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FROM THE DEPTHS

Lewis W. Hine, "The Spinner" 1913.

The Child Labor Bulletin, // (August, 1913), 20.

(Reproduced by courtesy of the George Eastman House.)

Ml-

From

the Depths

The Discovery of Poverty
in the United States

BY ROBERT H. BREMNER

V'J9W Washington Square • New York

NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS

V
3 6*

C. 3-

Library of Congress catalogue card number: 56-1622

Printed in the United States of America

G. L. B.
S. E. B.
C.M.B.

(V)

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

In a study of this kind the author's principal debt is to
the sources consulted in the preparation of the work. Even heavier
documentation than I have employed would be required to indicate
the full extent of my obligation for inspiration and information to
earlier writers and researchers.

Of the many persons who have aided me in assembling the
materials for the book I should like to express my particular gratitude
to Mr. J. G. Phelps Stokes, of New York, who gave me access to
his fine collection of papers relating to social- justice movements of
the Progressive era, and to the officers of the Community Service
Society of New York, who allowed me to utilize the historical
records of the Society. The librarians of the New York School of
Social Work, the New York Public Library, the Library of Congress,
and the Newberry Library have been unfailingly cooperative; none,
however, have been more consistently helpful than the staff members
of the Ohio State University Library.

The investigation was supported in part by funds granted to
the Ohio State University by the Research Foundation for aid in
fundamental research. I received further and very welcome assistance
from University officials during a portion of one academic year in
which I was relieved of teaching responsibilities and assigned to
research duty.

During the several years the study has been in progress I have
often been heartened by the interest taken in it by my wife, Catherine
Marting Bremner. I have also benefited from the encouragement
and constructive criticism offered by Professors Foster Rhea Dulles,
Paul A. Varg, and Harry Coles. Mr. Wilson Follett of the New

Acknowledgments vi

York University Press gave the manuscript a close and sympathetic
reading and suggested stylistic changes that I have been most happy
to incorporate in the final revision. To Mrs. Helen Varg, who cheer-
fully typed and retyped various drafts of the manuscript, and to Dr.
Morton Borden, who helped me in countless ways in the last stages
of the work, I offer my sincere thanks.

CONTENTS

Page

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS vii

INTRODUCTION xi

PART ONE

America Awakens to Poverty, c. 1830-1897

Chapter 1 The Problem Emerges 3

-Chapter 2 Shifting Attitudes 16

- Chapter 3 The Charitable Impulse 31

- Chapter 4 The Rise of Social Work 46

- Chapter 5 The Condition of the Poor: Late

Nineteenth-Century Social Investigations 67

^ Chapter 6 The Discovery of Poverty in Literature 86

Chapter 7 The Poverty Theme in Art and Illustration 108

PART TWO

The Search for Truth, c. 1897-1917

Chapter 8 The New View of Poverty 123

Chapter 9 A Factual Generation 140

Chapter 10 The Literary Record 164

Chapter 11 Art for Life's Sake 185

Contents vlil
PART THREE

Social Striving, c. 1897-1925

A Note on the Role of Social Workers in the

Reform Movement 201

Chapter 12 The Home and the Child 204

Chapter 13 Women's Hours and Wages * 230

Chapter 14 The Common Welfare 244

CONCLUSION The Price of Reform 260

A NOTE ON THE SOURCES 269

BIBLIOGRAPHY 309

INDEX 355

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Lewis W. Hine, "The Spinner," 1913

Thure de Thulstrup, "Where Two Ends Meet," 1891

Charles Graham, "West Gotham Court, Cherry Street," 1879

W. Bengough, "Mulberry Bend," 1895

Thomas Pollock Aushutz, "Steelworkers, Noon Time," 1890

Eugene Higgins, "Untilled Painting," c. 1905

Charles Haag, "Organized Labor," 1907

John Sloan, "Roof-Summer Night," 1906

Glenn O. Coleman, "The Shop Girl At Home," c. 1909

Art Young, "Holy Trinity," 1908

William Balfour Ker, "From the Depths," 1905

Art Young, "Pigs and Children," c. 1910

Art Young, "American Mothers," 1909

Lewis W. Hine, "Wash-Day in a Homestead Court," c. 1908

Lewis W. Hine, "The North Carolina Legislature in 1913
Declared That the Commercial Interest of the State
Required Such as These In the Cotton Mills," 1913 " 115

Frontisp

nece

Facing

> "

114

115

INTRODUCTION

In contrast to the peoples of less fortunate lands, who
have accepted poverty as inevitable, Americans have tended to regard
it as an abnormal condition. Our belief that want is unnatural and
unnecessary originated in a hopeful view of human nature. It has
been strengthened by our faith in the unlimited resources of the
New World and, especially in more recent years, by pride in the
productive achievements of the American economic system. This
optimistic outlook has not always served us well in dealing with the
misery that has in fact, and despite all our advantages, existed in our
midst. We have sometimes acted as though we expected distress to
cure itself, or have assumed that economic ills could be treated by
spiritual disciplines. Confidence in the eradicability of poverty has
nevertheless been a dynamic force for reform in the United States.
Because of our assumption that want is man-made, not God-made,
we have never lacked earnest critics to call us to account for both
our individual and our social failings. In every generation they have
reminded us that poverty is shameful, not only to those who suffer
from it, but also to the society that allows it to exist.

This book is a study of America's awakening to poverty as a
social problem. It is not a history of economic distress in the United
States, but an attempt to explain the factors that made Americans
conscious of and sympathetic to the misfortunes of their fellows.
My objectives are to trace the growth of factual information about
social conditions, to characterize and account for changing attitudes
toward poverty, to describe the ways in which writers and artists
have handled the subject of poverty in their work, and to present
the experiences and influences that led to the enactment of legislation

Introduction xii

affecting housing, child labor, women in industry, and industrial acci-
dents. Broadly stated, the purpose of the book is to show how
philanthropic movements have added to our awareness and under-
standing of the poverty problem.

Although I have not fixed precise dates for the beginning or
the end of the study, the period treated in most detail extends from
the middle decades of the nineteenth century to the 1920's. It was
in these years that the poverty problem as we now understand it
arose in the United States. It was in this period also that the attitude
toward the problem that still prevails took shape. A broader definition
of poverty than had previously obtained in the United States came
into general use, and opinion regarding its cause and cure underwent
significant alteration. By the close of the period insufficiency and
insecurity had come to be regarded as even more disturbing issues
than dependency; the industrial causes of misery were recognized
as more important than the moral; and social rather than individual
reform was being urged as the appropriate remedy for want. Partly
because of these developments, partly because of fundamental changes
in the nation's economic and social structure, the earlier philanthropic
interest in the poor had evolved into concern with the condition of
labor and the standard of living of the population as a whole.

The chief point made in the book is that the humanitarian
reform movements that swept the United States in the first two
decades of the twentieth century proceeded in large measure from
the new view of poverty. I have tried to demonstrate the importance
of organized philanthropy in the formulation of the new view, and
have emphasized the leading roles played by charity agents and
settlement residents in the fight for reform. The major contribution
of social work to social reform, as I see it, was to promote a factual,
undogmatic approach to economic issues.

In the course of the study I have been impressed by the parallel
development of factualism in the social sciences and realism in the
arts. So far as the book has a thesis it is that we owe our progress in
humanitarian reform and our best achievements in literature and art
to those individuals, regardless of field of endeavor, who have been
eager to discover, reveal, and be guided by the truths of actual life.

The heroes and heroines of the book are the "do gooders"— the
responsible Americans in every generation who have heard ^and
heeded the cry from the depths. These men and women have helped

Introduction xiii

the poor, but they have helped the rest of us even more; for by
seeking to aid and to understand the people at the bottom of the
social pile they have made our society more wholesome, our culture
more humane, and our spiritual life richer. They have taught us to
respect and to be more considerate of one another. Because of their
labors we are in a better position to continue the fight against poverty
wherever it exists; and because of the gains they made we are, or
ought to be, more confident than ever of eventual victory.

Since human need is a continuing fact, which each age discovers,
or thinks it discovers afresh, this book ends where the contemporary
problem of poverty begins. It deals only with the era in which
poverty made its initial impact on the conscience of the American
people. The adoption during the depression years of some of the
preventive measures proposed in the earlier period is barely touched
upon because it constitutes a different problem from the one here
discussed. So, too, does the story of the beginning made in more
recent years toward attacking poverty on an international front.

The task of assisting vast numbers of people in other areas of
the world to overcome want is a much more difficult assignment
than any that Americans have yet attempted. Compared to the work
that remains to be done on this still-unsolved and almost-untouched
problem the achievements we have scored against poverty in our
own country seem small. It is my belief, however, that an account
of our first conscious efforts to cope with the poverty problem at
home has relevance to the present issue; and it is my hope that readers
of this book will derive from it further appreciation of the need,
and the opportunity, and the hope for organized efforts to eliminate
and prevent misery in the larger community in which we now live.

Part One

AMERICA
AWAKENS TO
POVERTY

c. 1830-97

1. The Problem Emerges

2. Shifting Attitudes

3. The Charitable Impulse

4. The Rise of Social Work

5. Social Investigations

6. The Discovery of Poverty in Literature

7. The Poverty Theme in Art and Illustration

CHAPTER I

The Problem Emerges

Society must act on the highest principles, or its punishment inces-
santly comes within itself. The neglect of the poor, and tempted, and
criminal, is fearfully repaid.

Charles Loring Brace, The Dangerous Classes of New York
and Twenty Years' Work Among Them.

tRGE numbers of Americans first awoke to the social problem
of poverty at a time when the nation was pouring forth
unprecedented quantities of wealth and promising even richer
harvests for the future. During the first two centuries of the country's
development most Americans took it for granted that the majority
of men would always be poor. Poverty was the state from which
thousands of emigrants fled when they embarked, in hope or despair,
on the difficult journey to the New World; in the form of hardship,
privation, and suffering it was the lot, not only of the first settlers
on the alien coast, but of generations of pioneers on successive inland
frontiers. An increase in wealth, with a consequent improvement in
general living standards, was the condition precedent to an aroused
interest in poverty, for only in an era of material advance could want
seem incongruous; and only in the nineteenth century when, decade
by decade, the output of farm, factory, and mine climbed to higher
and higher totals, did Americans begin to question the age-old
assumption that poverty was the normal condition of the masses.

Unfortunately, the very economic processes that promised ulti-
mately to free mankind from want had the immediate effect of aggra-
vating, rather than alleviating, the distress of the working class.
Mechanization and the factory system, by minimizing the value of

America Awakens to Pooerty 4

traditional crafts and skills, reduced the bargaining power of the
individual workman almost to the vanishing point; what little he
had left was lost in contests with other men— and women and children,
too— for jobs which one was as competent to fill as another. The
prize in these races nearly always went to the cheapest. Despite the
fiction of freedom of contract, all the advantages in the arrangement
of terms of employment lay with the hirer. Employers, impelled not
only by desire for profit but also by the necessity for meeting the
competition of rivals, drove sharp bargains with their hands; they
altered pay and hours as they saw fit and dismissed help whenever
and for whatever reason they chose. These hard facts were made yet
harsher by the prevailing theory of political economy which held
that the welfare of individual laborers was a matter of small conse-
quence either to employers or to the state.

Under the circumstances, especially in the hard times that fol-
lowed the panics of 1819 and 1837, numbers of Americans sank into
depths of degradation and dependency previously unknown in this
country. At mid-century there was ample evidence that a poverty
problem, novel in kind and alarming in size, was emerging in the
United States. Many other issues clamored for attention, and then,
as later, most Americans found admiration of wealth a more profitable
occupation than contemplation of misery. Nevertheless a sizable
body of men and women agreed that there was no valid excuse, moral
or economic, for the presence of want in the midst of plenty; they
condemned the bending of human lives to the will of the machine
as inhumane and unwise; and they expressed regret and concern at
the signs of growing estrangement between social classes.

It was in the slums of the larger cities that Americans discovered
the new poverty that was invading the nation in the wake of indus-
trialization, urban growth, and immigration. Here were new worlds
of wretchedness characterized by ways of life foreign to American
experience and menacing to conventional standards of decency. "It is
often said that 'one half of the world does not know how the other
half lives/ " observed the pioneer sanitary reformer, Dr. John H.
Griscom, in the 1840's. Almost half a century before the publication
of Jacob Riis's How the Other Half Lives, and in language strikingly
similar to that Riis was to employ, Griscom described "the mournful
and disgusting condition" in which thousands of the "laboring popu-
lation" of New York passed their lives.1

The Problem Emerges 5

In Boston, at almost the same time, William Ellery Channing
was denouncing the practice of "letting cellars and rooms which
cannot be ventilated, which want the benefits of light, free air, and
pure water, and the means of removing filth!" The inhabitants of
these rooms were constantly exposed to "putrid, damp, and noisome
vapors" which, in Channing's opinion, worked sure destruction upon
their characters and bodies. They had less access to the blessings of
nature than the birds and the beasts, he said; and they were denied
"those cheering influences of the elements" that even savages
enjoyed.2

When Griscom and Channing wrote, as for many years there-
after, the most notorious slum in the nation was the Five Points
district of New York City. A popular novelist of the period compared
the Five Points to a great basin made of brick and mortar collecting
"all the nauseous drainage of the higher thoroughfare."3 That
energetic sight-seer, Charles Dickens, visited the Five Points by night
during his first tour of the United States. In American Notes (1842)
he depicted the "leperous houses" of the district; they appeared to
have been made prematurely old by debauchery, he thought, and
their broken and patched windows seemed "to scowl dimly, like
eyes that have been hurt in drunken frays." Investigating the attic of
one battered structure (under the guard of two policemen), Dickens
watched fascinated as half-awakened creatures crawled from their
corners "as if the judgment hour were at hand and every obscene
grave were giving up its dead."4

The initial reaction of the fortunate classes to slum dwellers
was one of repugnance rather than compassion. Dickens could not
resist asking whether the scavenging hogs owned by the inhabitants
of the Five Points did not occasionally wonder why their masters
walked upright and talked instead of grunting. Robert M. Hartley,
founder of the New York Association for Improving the Condition
of the Poor, denied that the "debased poor" were deserving of sym-
pathy. "They love to clan together in some out-of-the way place,"
he reported, "are content to live in filth and disorder with a bare
subsistence, provided they can drink, and smoke, and gossip, and
enjoy their balls, and wakes, and frolics, without molestation."5
Another observer, a clergyman, stated that residents of cellar lodg-
inghouses were devoid of moral feeling and sense of shame. "They
are not as decent as brutes," he said, referring to the unfortunate
inhabitants of a tenement which he described as "impregnated with

America Awakens to Poverty 6

a stench that would poison cattle."6 Josiah Strong, zealous advocate
of home and foreign missions, characterized slum life as "a com-
mingled mass of venomous filth and seething sin, of lust and drunken-
ness, of pauperism and crime of every sort."7 As late as 1894 a report
of the United States Commissioner of Labor defined slums as "dirty
back streets, especially such as are inhabited by a squalid and criminal
population."8

In the planless, rapidly growing cities extremes of fortune and
misfortune often dwelt side by side. Poverty might be dismissed as
a personal matter but the slums could not be brushed aside so easily.
Regions of "squalid want and wicked woe" lay little more than a
stone's throw from busy commercial streets and comfortable residen-
tial districts. Periodically, murderous and destructive riots beginning
in the turbulent slums terrorized entire cities for days at a time.
During the middle third of the century brawling regularly marked
the observance of the Sabbath, the celebration of holidays, and the
conduct of elections in the congested wards where the poor lived.
It was not entirely without reason or in a spirit of pure snobbery
that Charles Loring Brace, organizer of the Children's Aid Society,
referred to the inhabitants of these blighted areas as "the dangerous
classes."

Where casual observers saw the slum as the refuge of the already
criminal and degenerate, philanthropists such as Brace and Hartley
emphasized the importance of the slum environment in producing
undesirable citizens. Brace was frankly fearful of "that vast and
ignorant multitude, who, in prosperous times, just keep their heads
above water . . . and who look with envy and greed at the signs
of wealth all around them."9 For this very reason he counseled against
indifference toward the poor. Hartley argued that bad housing was
a prime factor in weakening the ability of laborers to support them-
selves, an almost insuperable obstacle to the economic, moral, or
religious elevation of the poor, and, consequently, a major cause of
the high taxes about which the well-to-do grumbled.10 Horace Gree-
ley's New York Tribune summed up the reformers' case against the
slums in 1864:

In those places garbage steams its poison in the sun; there thieves and
prostitutes congregate and are made; there are besotted creatures
who roll up blind masses of votes for the rulers who are a curse to
us; there are the deaths that swell our mortality reports; from there

The Problem Emerges 7

come our enormous taxes in good part; there disease lurks, and there
is the daily food of pestilence awaiting its coming.11

Like many of his contemporaries, Greeley believed that the most
serious menace held out by the slums was the constantly increasing
threat to public health. "Public" being a vague term, the reformers
sometimes expressed the idea in language better calculated to appeal
to the self-interest of the prosperous classes. "It is a well-established
fact that diseases are not confined to the localities where they origi-
nate, but widely diffuse their poisonous miasma," advised a sanitary
report issued in 1853. "Hence, though the poor may fall in greater
numbers because of their nearer proximity to the causes of disease,
yet the rich, who inhabit the splendid squares and spacious streets . . .
often become the victims of the same disorders which afflict their
poorer brethren."12

By the 1860's the connection between msanitary conditions in
crowded tenements and recurring epidemics of typhoid, cholera,
smallpox, and other diseases was fairly well recognized. Nevertheless,
for many years thereafter both charity agents and public-health
officials reported frequent instances of dangerous and offensive viola-
tions of the most elementary principles of hygiene. In 1884 an
inspector employed by the Association for Improving the Condition
of the Poor noted that in a house typical of hundreds of others the
plumbing was "as much an inlet for sewer gas as an outlet for waste
water." Close by the one hydrant serving all the occupants of a
five-story tenement the inspector found the only toilet accommoda-
tions available to the tenants of the building: a row of privies whose
floors were "slippery with urine" and whose seats, "foul with
abominable matter," were arranged in long, undivided ranges.13 As
long as such plague spots were tolerated, Greeley's prediction that
the slums would someday exact a frightful revenge upon society was
realized, not once, but repeatedly, in city after city across the nation.

The simplest and most frequently advanced explanation for the
manifold problems created by the slums was immigration. In the
earlier part of the century, at least in those sections where labor was
in short supply, the newcomers were welcomed enthusiastically.
The Chicago American rejoiced in 1835 because

the floodgates of enterprise seem to be let loose upon us and the mul-
titudes are crowding on to this young land, as if the pestilence were

America Awakens to Poverty S

behind, eager to find a better home, where they can build their
fortunes and their hopes, and enjoy the plenty which our fat fields
yield to the hand of industry 14

From an early date the seaboard cities regarded the matter in an
entirely different light. In 1819, in its Second Annual Report, the
New York Society for the Prevention of Pauperism listed immigra-
tion as the principal cause of pauperism. The Society bemoaned the
likelihood that for years to come "winds and waves will still bring
needy thousands to our seaports" and warned that New York was
"liable to be devoured by swarms of people."

Samuel F. B. Morse, author of two widely circulated books
whose contents are clearly suggested by their titles, Foreign Con-
spiracy Against the Liberties of the United States (1834) and
Imminent Dangers to the Free Institutions of the United States
Through Foreign Immigration (1835), was an unsuccessful candidate
for mayor of New York in 1835. Two years later, however, the
Whigs and Native Americans secured the election of their candidate
to the office. In his first message to the council the new mayor
complained that the hordes of foreigners were driving native work-
men into exile, "where they must war again with the savages of the
wilderness." He continued his attack on the immigrants with these
observations:

It is apprehended they will bring disease among us; and if they have
it not with them on arrival, they may generate a plague by collecting
in crowds within small tenements and foul hovels. What is to be-
come of them is a question of serious import. Our whole Alms House
Department is so full that no more can be received there without
manifest hazard to the health of every inmate. Petitions signed by
hundreds, asking for work, are presented in vain; private associations
for relief are almost wholly without funds. Thousands must there-
fore wander to and fro on the face of the earth, filling every part of
our once happy land with squalid poverty and profligacy.15

Similar expressions of opinion became more common as the
depression of 1837 wore on; and they became even more familiar
after the great influx of Irish and German emigrants in the late 1840's
and early 1850's. Behind immigration nativists professed to see a
sinister design on the part of Old World tyrannies to destroy the
United States by inundating it in a flood of paupers and criminals.1*

The Problem Emerges 9

Certain European cities did, in fact, rid themselves of such paupers
as could be induced to emigrate by paying their passage to America.
Thus, in 1839, in the midst of the depression, a miserable company
of immigrants, many still wearing the uniform of the Edinburgh
almshouse, arrived in New York; their transportation had been ar-
ranged by the overseers of the poor of Edinburgh.17

The necessity of caring for these and other immigrants who
were unable to support themselves imposed a considerable burden
on American taxpayers and philanthropists. In some cities uncon-
trolled immigration had the effect of doubling, or more than doubling,
the cost of poor relief; not infrequently the foreign-born outnum-
bered native-born Americans three to one on the rolls of private
charities.18 The harshness which nineteenth-century students thought
appropriate to the administration of charity and relief stemmed in
no small part from the settled conviction that numerous applicants
for aid had brought disaster upon themselves, and inconvenience to
the community, by their ill-advised and uninvited removal to the
United States.

In the heat of their resentment against the European practice
of shipping destitute persons to this country, Americans tended to
overlook other and more important reasons why recent immigrants
were so often compelled to ask for relief or charity. Most of them
were poor to begin with, and some exhausted what meager resources
they possessed in getting to America. Many were lured from home
by false pictures of ease and abundance painted by high-pressure
agents of shipping companies. The voyage was so difficult and
steerage conditions so bad that not a few of the immigrants (one
out of every six in some years) died on the way, sometimes leaving
widows or orphans to make their way unaided by husbands or
fathers. Those who survived arrived undernourished and in poor
health; they were met by sharpers who preyed on their ignorance
and bewilderment. When they found work they were paid so little
that they could scarce build up reserves to tide them over sickness
or unemployment. A recent student comments: "If the economic
pattern of the time had involved a fair return for the great contribu-
tion of the immigrant, the number of foreign-born paupers would
have been negligible."19

In the latter half of the century population movements, like
everything else, were conducted on a grander scale than ever before.

America Awakens to Poverty 10

Of the approximately twenty million persons who migrated to the
United States in the nineteenth century, all but about four million,
or roughly four out of five, came after 1860. Now the tendency to
blame immigration for whatever was disreputable in American life
became almost irresistible. Not only pauperism and crime, but hard
times, political corruption, intemperance, and pestilence were laid
at the door of the newcomers. A new prejudice against the allegedly
inferior races of southern and eastern Europe reinforced the earlier
Protestant bias against Catholic immigrants. Nativists in the 1850's,
resenting the foreign-born voters' activity in politics, had sought
not only to restrict the admission of foreigners but to limit the
political rights of those already in the country. Later and more
reputable reformers deplored the misuse of the suffrage by the
"ignorant and vicious poor," especially the immigrants in the slums,
who gave their fealty to saloonkeeping bosses in exchange for petty
kindnesses and pauperizing gifts of money, food, and fuel. Thomas
Bailey Aldrich called his poem "Unguarded Gates" (1892) a "protest
against America becoming the cesspool of Europe," and declared
that Kipling's description of the government of New York— "a
despotism of the alien, by the alien, for the alien, tempered with
occasional insurrections of decent folk"— applied to every American
city.20

As the century drew to a close there was suspicion at nearly all
levels of society that the immigrants, if not actually bent on the
destruction of American institutions, were nevertheless quite capable,
either through illiteracy or political immaturity, of subverting the
foundations of the republic. Conservatives, never very confident of
the ability of their fellow citizens to withstand the temptations of
foreign radicalism, protested that each ship bearing degraded and
undesirable persons to American ports carried an invisible cargo of
anarchism, communism, and other dangerous doctrines. Meanwhile,
spokesmen for labor declared that industry's systematic policy of
flooding the labor market with aliens was the major cause of unem-
ployment and low wages. The most moderate view, and the most
valid, was that uncontrolled immigration greatly complicated the
poverty problem in the United States by yearly increasing the num-
bers of the very poor.21

The immigration question kept the problem and, to a certain
extent, the plight of the desperately poor before the nation. As

The Problem Emerges 1 1

already suggested, some observers attributed the hardships encoun-
tered by American labor in its struggle for decent standards of work
and wages to the competition of "pauper labor" recruited overseas.22
But the furor over immigration also tended to obscure fundamental
economic questions in a fog of religious and national prejudices. It
provided such a convenient rationale of all the nation's ills that other
industrial issues received less attention than they deserved. John R.
Commons, writing in the mid-nineties, commented that the only
labor problem that seemed to excite much interest among clergymen
and church members was working on the Sabbath.23

From time to time an occasional student such as Orestes Brown-
son, deeply stirred by the crosscurrents of political democracy and
industrial servitude, described the relations between capital and labor
as a class struggle.24 For the most part, however, through all the
vicissitudes of the nineteenth century, most American writers clung
to the belief that paternalism offered the proper solution to industrial
problems. If only employers could be induced to deal kindly with
employees, they reasoned, workmen would respond by rendering
faithful and loyal service. Then labor strife would disappear; there
would be no sweating, no unions, no strikes, and no black lists.
Capital, as befitting its superior position, would act as the guardian
of the interests of labor. Subordinate, but not exploited, labor would
become the stanch support of capital.

That something like this relationship prevailed in certain estab-
lishments is beyond question. But there were many more instances in
which neither capital nor labor was content to play the role assigned
it by benevolent outsiders. One factory manager boasted: "I regard
my workpeople just as I regard my machinery. So long as they can
do my work for what I choose to pay them, I keep them, getting out
of them all I can."25 Some employers, however, regarded their ma-
chinery with more tenderness than their workpeople— at least the high
toll of industrial accidents seemed to indicate an extravagance in
regard to human costs in otherwise economically managed enterprises.
A sympathetically portrayed businessman in a novel published in the
1880's summed up the whole problem when he remarked of certain
industrialists, "They want to become rich in five years and how can
they do that except by oppression?"26

Whether justly or not, many workers were dissatisfied with both
the conditions and the rewards of their labor. Whenever they were
strong enough to do so they delivered their protest at the polls,

America Awakens to Poverty 12

through trade-unions, and by acts of violence. Strikes for the ten-
hour day were plentiful in the boom years before the depression of
1837; fifty years later they were being waged for the eight-hour day.
During the seventies, eighties, and nineties workingmen expressed
their discontent with existing conditions in a series of strikes that
outdid in number and virulence any yet known in American history.
It is almost impossible for a later generation to conceive of the
chaotic upheavals that periodically rocked whole communities at a
time when industrial relations consisted of intimidation on one side
and terrorism on the other, when spying was countered by sabotage,
and when a "labor dispute" meant an armed skirmish between em-
battled strikers and entrenched employers.

As a rule public opinion condemned strikes; for the anarchy of
labor was deemed more reprehensible than the despotism of capital.
Many observers unhesitatingly put the blame for industrial strife on
"socialistic agitators and communistic tramps." Nevertheless, these
bitter conflicts brought to light shocking examples of exploitation,
and their total effect was to compel thoughtful men and women to
give more serious study to labor problems. The novelist and essayist
Charles Dudley Warner believed unionism "an extraordinary
tyranny," but he was willing to admit its usefulness in focusing
public attention upon "certain hideous wrongs, to which the world
is likely to continue selfishly indifferent unless rudely shaken out of
its sense of security."27

Incessant industrial warfare convinced a number of students
that something must be done to compel employers to treat their
workers better. Remedial action, including the enactment of factory
laws, seemed imperative both on humanitarian grounds and to remove
a major cause of social tensions. Cardinal Gibbons chided employers
for paying less heed to the welfare of the driver of the horsecar than
to the well-being of the car horse.28 Josephine Shaw Lowell, a nation-
ally known leader in scientific philanthropy, early announced her
conviction that fair wages rather than doles of charity were the answer
to industrial unrest.29 W. S. Rainsford, pastor of a leading institutional
church in New York City, declared that a visit to Pittsburgh at the
time of the Homestead strike had removed all doubt from his mind
as to the need for unions. The lesson of Homestead, he said, was that
workingmen must cooperate with one another if they were to secure
the simplest of human rights.30

The Problem Emerges 13

Such expressions of opinion were deplored by conservatives,
who denied that employers had neglected their responsibilities to
employees, and maintained that any outside interference with indus-
trial labor policies, whether by workers' organizations or by legisla-
tion, was an invasion of the prerogatives of management. Further-
more, they argued, there was no cause for complaint since everyone
agreed that the average workingman in 1890 was better off in every
way— except possibly in morality and respect for authority— than his
grandfather in 1830. Throughout the century the conservative pre-
scription for labor's discontent was not higher wages but harder
work and stricter economy. Employers' spokesmen criticized the
movement for a shorter workday on the grounds that ten hours
instead of twelve, or eight instead of ten, would result only in
increased idleness and dissipation. During the depression of 1819
distressed families were urged to take advantage of the savings
offered by a recipe for a cheap and wholesome dish composed of
rice and mutton suet.31 Philanthropists offered similar advice in later
emergencies; toward the end of the century a New England insur-
ance executive invented a cookstove called the Aladdin Oven,
and drew up principles of food preparation which he estimated
would save working-class families five cents a day per person-
sufficient, he thought, to enable laborers to subsist adequately on
prevailing wages.32

Household economy was a singular panacea to press upon the
working poor at a time when the idle rich were indulging themselves
in riotous extravagance. The real weakness of the conservative argu-
ment, however, was that it failed to reckon with the tendency of
men to compare themselves with their contemporaries rather than
with their ancestors.33 As Josiah Strong pointed out, if material con-
ditions had altered greatly in two generations, men had changed
even more. They had more wants and more confidence in their
ability to satisfy them, more education and more self-respect.34 The
unrest which was so characteristic of the closing decades of the
nineteenth century had its origin in the fact that a great many of
the working people were unwilling to live out their days in the social
steerage.

Few experiences were more unsettling to the average American's
peace of mind than the depressions which, although always unex-

America Awakens to Poverty 14

pected, recurred with almost monotonous regularity at intervals of
from fifteen to twenty years after 1819. Long before the end of the
century the nation had become familiar with soup lines, demonstra-
tions by the unemployed, demands for the relief of debtors— rich as
well as poor— lamentations over past errors, and dire predictions for
the future. "Let every individual calculate for himself what he,
personally, has lost, what chances have been sacrificed by him, what
he might have done, and what he might have been, if the prosperity
of the country had not been arrested," mused a writer in 1840.35
We cannot gauge the precise extent to which these calamitous events
shook the common man's confidence in hard work and thrift as an
unfailing recipe for security. There is no doubt, however, that loss
of jobs, farms, and savings as a result of cyclic panics and price
fluctuations led to widespread disillusionment and bitterness. Even
men and women who were not directly affected by bank or business
failures had reason to fear that their means of livelihood might be
snatched from them by remote and impersonal forces. Thus early,
threads of anxiety were being woven into the traditionally optimistic
fabric of American character.

In normal times Americans were accustomed to think of unem-
ployment as exclusively the problem of the inefficient and indolent.
Conservatives stuck to this view even in depression years. They
recommended that relief be dealt out sparingly lest the recipients be
tempted into permanent dependency. Respectable folk looked upon
"tramps," a numerous but ill-defined group, as pariahs deserving only
"the toe of a boot by day and a cold stone floor by night."38 Under
the impact of hard times, however, it was easier to grasp the distinc-
tion between voluntary and enforced idleness. From the 1840's
onward, although in insignificant numbers until after the depression
of 1893, some students were willing to admit that "nonemployment"
was a constant problem, affecting the competent no less than the
incompetent, the industrious as well as the slothful.37 In the late
thirties and forties Greeley's sympathies went out to the respectable
mechanics "whose cry was, not for the bread and fuel of charity,
but for Work!"38 Almost fifty years later a Tribune writer, Helen
Campbell, commented that the real issue was quite different from
pauperism: it was the tragic, undeserved embarrassment of persons
who wanted no charity and needed no correction.39

Dearth of work had a psychological as well as economic signifi-

The Problem Emerges 15

cance in the United States because the entire American creed of
individualism and self-help was based on the assumption that earnest
seekers could always find honest employment. Unemployment was
by no means a new phenomenon, but never before the closing decade
of the nineteenth century had its shadow hung so heavily over so
many men and women. The sons and daughters of farmers and village
tradesmen who had migrated to the cities to obtain salaried positions
in stores and offices were more vulnerable than their parents had
been to business crises. The immigrants who had deserted ancestral
villages in Europe to swell the ranks of the American industrial army
had nothing but their weekly wages to serve as bulwarks against
want. At the end of the century urban Americans, in a real but novel
sense, were living in a state of dependency. Even though, as indi-
viduals, they experienced unemployment only briefly and at rare
intervals, if at all, the nagging fear of it was almost chronic with
them.

This does not mean that the average citizen despaired of the
future. Far from it. Despite misgivings about his present situation
he believed that there lay ahead, and almost within reach, a more
wholesome and commodious plane of life for all men. The expecta-
tion of reaching the promised land of security and plenty in the
foreseeable future gave Americans confidence and hope. If doubts
sometimes overtook men of small or moderate means, the reason was
not so much that the climb was steep as that their footing was unsure.

Americans were immensely proud that in their land the long-
despised common man had raised himself to a new level of material
well-being. Yet they had not rid themselves of the chilling presence
that Edward Bellamy called "the specter of uncertainty." Perhaps
it was because they had risen so high that the possibility of plunging
downward seemed so frightful. The insecurity of their position led
them, by almost imperceptible degrees, to question and ultimately to
alter their attitudes toward poverty.

CHAPTER 2

Shifting Attitudes

I think the best way of doing good to the poor, is, not making them
easy in poverty, but leading or driving them out of it.

Benjamin Franklin, On the Price of Corn,

and Management of the Poor.

Write a sermon on Blessed Poverty. Who have done all the good
in the world? Poor men. "Poverty is a good hated by all men."

Ralph Waldo Emerson, Journals, entry for
May 12, 1832.

IN the latter half of the nineteenth century the American attitude
toward poverty was a somewhat incongruous composite of two
sharply contrasting points of view. Mindful of Christ's dictum,
"The poor always ye have with you," traditional religion taught that
poverty was a visitation upon men of God's incomprehensible but
beneficent will. Although inescapable, poverty was a blessing in
disguise, for it inspired the rich to acts of loving charity and led the
poor into the paths of meekness, patience, and gratitude. In contra-
diction to these teachings American experience indicated that poverty
was unnecessary. When there was work for all, no man who was
willing to do his share need want. Indigence was simply the punish-
ment meted out to the improvident by their own lack of industry
and efficiency. Far from being a blessed state, poverty was the
obvious consequence of sloth and sinfulness.

More or less unconsciously the nineteenth-century American
combined these divergent views into a creed that ran approximately
as follows: Poverty is unnecessary (for Americans), but the varying
ability and virtue of men make its presence inevitable; this is a

Shifting Attitudes 17

desirable state of affairs, since without the fear of want the masses
would not work and there would be no incentive for the able to
demonstrate their superiority; where it exists, poverty is usually a
temporary problem and, both in its cause and cure, it is always an
individual matter.

This creed both followed and departed from the traditional
religious view. It accepted the inevitability of want and need but
attributed their cause to man rather than to God. It recognized the
value of differences in economic status, not so much as a spiritual
discipline in generosity and humility, but as a goad to spur the
ambitious to success and as a penalty for failure in the competitive
struggle. It did not deny the obligation of the fortunate to aid the
unfortunate, but it so emphasized the responsibility of each individual
to look out for his own interests that it promoted a kind of social
irresponsibility. Despite its hardheaded practicality, it left uncertain
whether poverty was to be regarded as the soil from which Lincoln
and Carnegie had sprung, or the breeding ground of the dangerous
classes.

The individualistic interpretation of poverty, like its corollary
the individualistic interpretation of wealth, was based on a revolu-
tionary concept of man, society, and religion. It was not a new
thing to exhort the masses to work; throughout the centuries toil
had been their lot. By tradition, however, labor was an onerous
duty attaching to the lowborn. It had never been highly regarded,
well rewarded, or entirely free. The boast of Americans, the
characteristic that made American life seem so vulgar to older
civilizations, was that here, for almost the first time in history,
labor was prized for its own sake. The promise of America was not
affluence, but independence; not ease, but a chance to work for
oneself, to be self-supporting, and to win esteem through hard and
honest labor.

The gospel of self-help was well suited to the needs and circum-
stances of American life in the earlier part of the nineteenth century.
Then, in a very real sense, a man's ability to take care of himself
was a social asset, and inability to do so a liability. In sparsely settled,
rapidly growing communities, where labor was scarce, there was
substantial truth in the assumption that willingness to work brought
material well-being, while failure implied some personal defect in the
sufferer. The experience of countless immigrants and native-born

America Awakens to Poverty \S

Americans alike substantiated the national confidence in the common
man's ability to achieve the good life through his own exertions.
As one writer expressed it, the founding fathers may have intended
the United States to be an asylum for the distressed peoples of the
Old World; but it was a workhouse that they had prepared, not a
refuge for idlers.1

The era of self-help in economics coincided with a similarly
oriented period in religion. In the first half of the nineteenth century
salvation through personal regeneration was a dynamic and still rela-
tively novel theological doctrine. Americans embraced the belief that
the door to heaven was open to all who made themselves worthy to
enter with the same enthusiasm that characterized their faith in free
enterprise and manhood suffrage. The new religious currents infused
a spirit of optimism into discussions of economic no less than of
religious questions. Previously the weight of ecclesiastical authority
had more often than not been cast on the side of passive acceptance
of inequality of status; for, as already suggested, the churches taught
that providence decreed the existence of poverty among men. The
Universalists, the Unitarians, and the numerous revivalistic sects,
however, proclaimed that neither earthly want nor eternal damnation
was foreordained for the masses of men. On the contrary, they
asserted, just as any man could purify himself of sin, so he could
purge himself of the bad habits that led to indigence.

Emancipation from the authoritarian puritanical theology and
acceptance of religious creeds that emphasized the dignity and
perfectibility of man loosed a tumult of energy for the cause of
moral and humanitarian reform. It is not surprising that when this
energy was directed toward the problem of poverty the initial
impulse was to attack those individual vices, such as intemperance
and immorality, that were regarded as barriers both to salvation and
to temporal prosperity. Nor is it surprising that enlightened philan-
thropists in the nineteenth century should have deemed almsgiving
as of less benefit to the poor than guidance into the path of morality
and self-discipline.2

The individualistic interpretation of poverty began as a hopeful
and essentially radical doctrine. Well before the end of the century,
however, it had been converted into a formidable bulwark of that
strange brand of conservatism espoused by the dominant business

Thure de Thulstrup, "Where Two Ends Meet," 1891.
Harper's Weekly, XXXV (1891), 616-11.

Charles Graham, "West
Gotham Court, Cherry
Street" 1819. Harper's
Weekly, XXlll (1819), 245.

40*

*i 2^m

■^f/gtjjt^g,' H

W. Bengough, "Mulberry Bend;' 1895. Harper's Weekly, XXXIX (1895), 601.

Thomas Pollock Anshutz, "Steelivorkers, Noon Time" 1890. Design. The Creative
Art Magazine, LIU (1952), 195. (Reproduced by courtesy of Mr. and Mrs. Lawrence
Fleishchman and Design. The Creative Art Magazine.)

Shifting Attitudes 19

classes. Like the other principles of laissez-faire economics, the indi-
vidualistic interpretation was given a supposedly scientific basis by
the teachings of Herbert Spencer and his American disciples, and
also by the early application of Darwinian biology to social thought.
If, as the Spencerians and Social Darwinists asserted, competition was
the law of life, there was no remedy for poverty except individual
self-help. The poor who remained poor must pay the price exacted
by nature from all the unfit. Any interference in their behalf,
whether undertaken by the state or by unwise philanthropists, was
not only pointless but absolutely dangerous. Protecting the weak in
the struggle for existence would only permit them to multiply and
could lead to no other result than a disastrous weakening of the
species; it would thwart nature's plan of automatic, evolutionary
progress toward higher forms of social life.3

Although the pseudoscientific assignments advanced to justify
inequality and to condone misery never went unchallenged, the
theory that poverty was caused exclusively by personal frailty was
not easily supplanted. Endowed with a new aura of authority, this
theory retained a loyal following long after the disappearance of
the peculiar circumstances that had once given it a certain practical
validity, and despite the emergence of conditions that strongly indi-
cated the need for different hypotheses. For many years the problems
of tenement dwellers in large cities, or of unemployed workmen in
the breadlines, continued to be discussed as though the people in-
volved were ne'er-do-wells in a frontier community. Nevertheless,
under the impact of social and industrial changes the inadequacies
and fallacies of the individualistic explanation became more obvious,
and its critics gradually became more numerous and outspoken.

Herman Melville, writing in 1854, scoffed at the slander of the
poor by the prosperous. "Of all the preposterous assumptions of
humanity over humanity," he wrote, "nothing exceeds most of the
criticisms made on the habits of the poor by the well-housed, well-
warmed, and well-fed." In Melville's opinion, poverty was no bless-
ing, actual or potential, but "a misery and infamy, which is, ever has
been, and ever will be, precisely the same in India, England, and
America." He felt that the mental anguish of the native American
poor was more intense than that of any similar class in the rest of
the world. This was because in the rich new land a sense of shame
was attached to poverty, producing repugnance toward charity at

America Awakens to Poverty 20

all social levels; and also because there was an appreciation, on the
part of the American poor, of "the smarting distinction between
their ideal of universal equality and their grindstone experience of
the practical misery and infamy of poverty. . . ."4

At the same time as Andrew Carnegie and Horatio Alger were
preaching that poverty in youth was the key to prosperity in age-,
other observers were recalling Theodore Parker's warning that the
destruction of the poor was their poverty. The findings of British
students were quoted to prove that bitter need was a lesson in
improvidence rather than in thrift; and that if intemperance led to
poverty it was equally true that being poor drove men to drink.5
Ira Steward, labor reformer and early advocate of the eight-hour
workday, contended that "Poverty crams cities and their tenement
houses with people whose conduct and votes endanger the republic."
In his opinion, the problems that disturbed and perplexed mankind
were incapable of solution while the masses remained poor.6

Americans long took comfort in the belief that the boundless
opportunities offered by a rich and relatively unpeopled continent
afforded a sure cure for the economic ills of the discontented classes.
Orestes Brownson's warning, voiced in 1840, that the wilderness had
receded so far that the new lands were already beyond the reach of
the mere laborer, went unheeded.7 Much more typical was the
assurance given the Boston Society for the Prevention of Pauperism
in 1844: "Untilled fields are around us; unhewn forests before; and
growing villages and cities are springing up upon every side."8 For
half a century "the West" was the medicine prescribed for all those
who wished to better their condition. Joseph Kirkland's Zury (1888),
although more consciously realistic than most pictures of frontier life,
began in a characteristic vein:

In the prairies, Nature has stored, and preserved thus far through the
ages, more life-materials than she ever before amassed in the same
space. It is all for man, but only for such men as can take it by cour-
age and hold it by endurance. Many assailants are slain, many give
up and fly, but he who is sufficiently brave, and strong, and faithful,
and fortunate, to maintain the fight to the end, has ample reward.9

Even as Kirkland wrote, however, "the myth of the garden"
was being exposed to critical scrutiny. A contributor to The Forum
dealt realistically with the practical obstacles that made it extremely

Shifting Attitudes 21

unlikely that the masses in Eastern cities could improve their lot on
Western homesteads; and Henry Demarest Lloyd declared in 1884:
"Our young men can no longer go west; they must go up or down."10
Meanwhile, other critics denied the truth of another tenet of
American individualism: the opportunity available to all to rise from
a lower to a higher social class. The youthful John R. Commons
declared in 1894:

Class lines have become more rigid, and the individual, if his lot be in
the unpropertied class, is destined, as a rule, to remain there. His
economic resources determine, by relentless pressure, what shall be
his social environment.11

Josiah Strong also contended that wealth and poverty were becoming
more and more matters of inheritance and less and less products of
character.12 William Dean Howells took an even darker view of the
situation. "Here and there one will release himself from it," he wrote
of poverty, "and doubtless numbers are alway[s] doing this, as in the
days of slavery there were always fugitives; but for the great mass
captivity remains."13

It was particularly difficult for nineteenth-century Americans to
accept the fact that in a complex economy individuals were no longer
such independent agents as they had seemed to be but a few decades
earlier. By the 1890's, however, numerous students were pointing out
that not clerk nor factory hand nor farmer was as free as formerly
to determine, by his own efforts, whether his labor would be well
or ill rewarded, or even whether there would be a place for him in
the productive processes of the nation. An impersonal element had
invaded economics with the result that personal virtue, or the lack
of it, counted for little in determining whether men were rich or
poor. On the contrary, it was increasingly apparent that individuals
suffered as often from the misdeeds and miscalculations of others as
from their own failings. In the year before the panic of 1893
President E. B. Andrews of Brown University wrote prophetically
that the worst vice of modern industry was that it frequently visited
curses on men through events which they had no part in originating.
Under existing circumstances, said Andrews, "a great many men are
poor without the slightest economic demerit. They are people who
do the best they can, and always have done so. . . . Yet they are
poor, often very poor, never free from fear of want."14 Josephine

America Awakens to Poverty 11

Shaw Lowell wrote of the people rendered jobless by the depression
of 1893 that the causes of their distress were "as much beyond their
power to avert as if they had been natural calamities of fire, flood,
or storm."15

Hard times on the farm, where the heaviest work, the plainest
living, and the most abundant harvest sometimes brought but scant
profit to the cultivator of the soil gave many Americans firsthand
experience with the impersonal causes of poverty. Hamlin Garland's
stories in Main-Travelled Roads (1891) were peopled by men and
women who, like Garland's own parents, had nothing to show for
years of drudgery except lined faces and gnarled hands. In "Under
the Lion's Paw" he told of a farmer who saw the fruit of his toil
consumed in one year by a plague of grasshoppers and in another by
the equally voracious greed of a land speculator. Despite their tradi-
tional reliance on self-help, the farmers were among the first occupa-
tional groups in the United States to renounce the individualistic
interpretation. They saw and felt the effects of poverty-producing
factors with which individuals were unable to deal, not only in
natural disasters such as drought, but in railroad abuses, the sharp
practices of middlemen and moneylenders, and in governmental
currency and fiscal policies. They did not hesitate to demand relief
for sufferers from the acts of God, regulation of private businesses
that affected the public welfare, and other legislation that ran
counter to the assumed natural laws of laissez faire.16 The agrarian
parties were the radical ones of the seventies, eighties, and nineties
because they proposed social remedies for the impersonal forces that
imposed hardship on a large proportion of the nation's people.17

According to the creed of self-help it was as reprehensible to
obtain wealth without working for it as to be poor because of
laziness. In practice, criticism of the idle rich was less frequently
voiced than condemnation of the shiftless poor, but it was by no
means lacking. In a novel entitled The Wreckers (1886), George T.
Dowling asserted that the most dangerous elements in society were
"the rich who do not know how to use their riches." Several years
later the author of an article in Scribner's Magazine declared: "The
opulent who are not rich by the results of their own industry . . .
suffer atrophy of virile and moral powers, and, like paupers, live
on the world's surplus without adding to it or giving any fair
equivalent for their maintenance.

"18

Shifting Attitudes 23

Grover Cleveland's vetoes of pension bills and his messages
urging reduction of tariff duties directed public attention, not only
to the specific issues at hand, but also to the broader question of the
extent to which some persons profited through circumstances unre-
lated to their own merit. In his Fourth Annual Message, delivered
after his defeat in the election of 1888, Cleveland told the Congress
"We discover that the fortunes realized by our manufacturers are
no longer solely the reward of sturdy industry and enlightened
foresight, but that they result from the discriminating favor of the
government and are largely built upon undue exactions from the
masses of our people." Later in the same message he cautioned that

. . . the communism of combined wealth and capital, the outgrowth
of overweening cupidity and selfishness, which insidiously under-
mines the justice and integrity of free institutions, is not less danger-
ous than the communism of oppressed poverty and toil, which,
exasperated by injustice and discontent, attacks with wild disorder
the citadel of rule.19

Subsequently numerous critics of the plutocratic drift cited both the
lavish bestowal of Civil War pensions and the granting to favored
industries of unwarrantedly high tariff protection as largely respon-
sible for the rise of "the pauper spirit" in American life.20 The tariff
controversy remained a heated one for many years and, by provoking
a more critical study of the sources of wealth, fostered the develop-
ment of a more realistic approach to the problem of poverty. By the
turn of the century tariff reformers had convinced some Americans
that the rich, to an even greater extent than the poor, were guilty of
seeking "something for nothing."

No single figure in the last two decades of the nineteenth century
was more successful than Henry George in arousing public opinion
to an awareness of the social origins of wealth and poverty. Yet
there was nothing new in his assertion that land values were created
by the growth and needs of the community rather than by efforts
of the proprietor; that was precisely the principle which canny land
speculators had taken for granted ever since colonial days. Several
years before the publication of Progress and Poverty (1879) the
theory of unearned increment had been expounded in homespun
dialect by a character in Edward Eggleston's popular novel The
Hoosier Schoolmaster:

America Awakens to Pooerty 24

Jack, he's wuth lots and gobs of money, all made out of Congress
land. Jack didn't get rich by hard work. Bless you, no! Not him.
That a'n't his way. Hard work a'n't, you know. 'Twas that air six
hundred dollars he got along of me, all salted down into Flat Crick
bottoms at a dollar and a quarter a acre. . . .21

George's contribution was to redirect attention from the individual
benefits to the social consequences of private profit in land. He
argued that permitting landlords to pocket the socially created value
of land actually meant allowing them to take from the public wealth
that properly belonged to the community as a whole. As a result, he
said, the few were unmeritedly enriched, the many unjustly bur-
dened. Furthermore, he continued, existing laws gave the owners
of land and natural resources not only the legal right to fix the terms
under which these necessities might be utilized, but also the power
to hold them out of productive use. George believed that as long as
these extraordinary powers resided in private hands it was inevitable
that many citizens should experience involuntary and undeserved
privation in the form of unemployment, inadequate wages, and
extortionate rents.

The fact that George was an unusually eloquent advocate of
free competition helps to explain why his diagnosis of society's ills
won wide popular approval. His attack on private profit in land was
not essentially different from the earlier laissez-faire economists'
criticism of monopolies and other vested rights. Like them, George
assumed that if monopolistic restraints on industry and trade could
be removed, competition between free and unhampered individuals
would work an automatic improvement in social conditions. Perhaps
George differed from the earlier advocates of laissez faire mainly in
the complete confidence he placed in competition as a beneficent
and direct instrument for the welfare of all levels of society.22

The novelty of Georgian economics lay in its optimistic outlook
and humanitarian bias. In no sense was George's influence more
significant than in the conviction he inspired in the rising generation
that poverty was abnormal— contrary to, rather than dictated by,
natural law. To George involuntary poverty seemed, not an ineradi-
cable problem, but, on the contrary, one that could be solved by
simple and relatively painless social action. Even those who rejected
the specific remedies he proposed were encouraged by his example
to take up the fight against want.

Shifting Attitudes 25

Not only George's own writings but the protracted argument
they excited between his supporters and opponents kindled new
interest in all issues affecting human welfare. His contention that,
despite all the material progress of the century, the rich were growing
richer and the poor poorer provoked several pioneer efforts to esti-
mate the distribution of property in the United States and the relative
shares of the national income going to capital and labor. Although
crude by later statistical standards, and generally unreliable since
there was at the time no public or private registry of profits, these
ventures were far from useless. If nothing else they revealed the
need for more factual information on which to posit economic
generalizations. In themselves they were evidences of the emergence
of an objective, analytical approach to problems that had hitherto
been looked at from an almost exclusively subjective and moralistic
point of view.23

George's adulation of competition was not shared by some of
the other students of social institutions who were his contemporaries.
Felix Adler confessed that the Single Tax remedy— "a single draught
of Socialism with unstinted individualism thereafter"— never attracted
him.24 Henry Demarest Lloyd, Edward Bellamy, George D. Herron,
and William Dean Howells each expressed repugnance, not only for
sharp business practices, but also for the selfishness which they
thought underlay competitive economics. "We are not good enough
or wise enough to be trusted with this power of ruining ourselves
in the attempt to ruin others," cried Lloyd in 1884. Like the old anti-
slavery agitator, Theodore Parker, Lloyd and the other critics of
competitive capitalism insisted that the purpose of life was to live,
not to amass property.25 They rejected competition because they
thought it produced an atmosphere of insecurity in which conscience
and kindness were subordinated to the naked instinct of economy.
The central idea of Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward (1888)
was the comparison of a kindly and efficient cooperative society with
a blundering, helplessly cruel competitive way of life. Helen Camp-
bell, a forerunner of the muckrakers, wrote a series of newspaper
articles on New York sweatshops in 1886 in which she cited instances
of well-intentioned employers who were forced, by the intense
competition prevailing in the needle trades, to choose between giving
up their scruples and getting out of business.26 E. B. Andrews pur-
sued the same theme when he alleged that under competition one

America Awakens to Poverty 26

could not obey conscience without becoming a martyr. "The best
men in a trade do not fix its maxims," he asserted, "but the worst. . . .
Out of this murderous competition there is survival not of the fittest
but of the unfittest, the sharpest, the basest."27

The moral objection to competition arose in large part from a
feeling that such savage strife as individualism implied was not only
unseemly, but unnecessary. Said George D. Herron: "There is
enough in this world for all to have and enjoy in abundance, if there
were a system by which there could be an equitable distribution of
that abundance upon the principle of the divine economy."28 To
men such as Herron, who thought that capitalism was unchristian,
the so-called personal causes of poverty appeared insignificant in
comparison with the larger problem of a fantastically inefficient
system of economics. "What other result can we expect under our
present organization than that great numbers of persons should be
poor?" "Our economic order is not intended to serve any social
purpose, but only to enrich individuals." Poverty was far from seem-
ing an insoluble problem to the Christian Socialists, but they did not
expect any significant improvement in conditions until society saw
fit to adopt a system of production and distribution better suited to
its physical and ethical needs.

Those who opposed competition on ethical grounds scorned
what seemed to them the parvenu conception of society as a mere
bundle of distinct and irresponsible individuals. Instead, they gave
their allegiance to the much older ideal of society as an organism.
Not only religion, but also the realities of contemporary industrial
society made them think it was necessary to regard society as a unit.
Josiah Strong used the analogy of an ocean liner to illustrate the
unity of social interest. If the steerage goes to the bottom, he said,
so does the cabin; if pestilence rages among third-class passengers,
first-class travelers cannot afford to be indifferent. "Modern civiliza-
tion is fast getting us all into one boat," wrote Strong, "and we are
beginning to learn how much we are concerned with the concerns
of others "29

The emphasis they so often placed upon the organic unity of
society helps to explain why even the most vigorous critics of con-
temporary social conditions at the turn of the century refused to
endorse violent methods of eliminating the evils they denounced.
The idea of competing classes was no less repugnant to them than

Shifting Attitudes 27

that of competing individuals; and they were convinced that drastic
and revolutionary purges were useless to remedy the ills of society.
If a house has fallen into ruin, said Washington Gladden, the
sensible course may well be to tear it down and build another. But
society is not an inanimate thing; it is a living organism, more like a
tree than a house. And if a tree is pining we cannot cure its sickness
by overturning it. "It may need pruning, and its life may need
invigorating by the addition of fertilizers to the soil in which it
grows: it cannot be pulled down and rebuilt."30

Recognition of the unwholesome results of individualism in
economics was accompanied by a lessening emphasis upon individ-
ualism in religion. In the earlier years of the century an authoritarian
theology had been rejected in favor of a more democratic creed of
salvation through individual regeneration. That change, as we have
seen, had produced a zeal for the elimination of the personal vices
that made salvation impossible. By the eighties and nineties it was
becoming apparent that environmental factors and external economic
pressures made the task of individual moral improvement extremely
difficult. Even good men, pious church members, and solid citizens
were seen to be involved in the impersonal cruelties dealt out by
corporate enterprise. Rich and poor alike appeared, to some observers,
at least, to be enmeshed in an amoral system that too often rewarded
cunning more than character and made men indifferent to their
fellows. At the end of the century Washington Gladden was telling
Yale divinity students that "one man can no more be a Christian
alone than one man can sing an oratorio alone"— and entitling the
collected volume of his addresses to them Social Salvation.31 Glad-
den's view, which was by no means peculiar to him, was that society,
even more than individuals, stood in need of regeneration.

Earnest reformers such as Theodore Parker and Stephen Colwell
had demanded just such a reorientation of religious approach even
before the Civil War, but it was not until the last two decades of the
century that any considerable number of Protestant clergymen began
to devote their attentions to the various problems growing out of
rapid industrial and urban growth. The social gospel which then
emerged had its roots in the religio-humanitarian movements of a
half century earlier. It was in part a conscious effort to counteract
the alienation of the working class from organized religion.32 Ex-

America Awakens to Poverty 28

amined from a slightly different angle, however, the social gospel
may be interpreted as an attempt by conscientious pastors to shake
their predominantly middle-class congregations out of complacent
self -righteousness and make them realize their own responsibility for
social injustice. There are more important moral questions than
Sabbath breaking, card playing, and intemperance, urged the fol-
lowers of the social gospel. The conditions under which men and
women work and the circumstances in which they spend their
lives are moral questions, too. Gladden warned that unless the
churches became thoroughly aroused about these issues and used
their influence to promote fundamental reform, they would cease
to be religious bodies and degenerate into institutions for the preser-
vation of meaningless rites and superstitions.

The Roman Catholic Church, adhering more closely than the
Protestant sects to the traditional religious interpretation of poverty,
was frankly critical of individualism whether in religion or econo-
mics. Catholicism took poverty for granted; it did not deny that
some men were impoverished by lives of sin or habits of improvi-
dence; but it also recognized that others were permitted to live in
indigence by the mysterious dispensation of God. To Catholics,
man was at best a weak vessel; his failings were an object of pity and
an outlet for charity rather than a cause for scorn. Although holding
to the idea that poverty was permanent and ineradicable— and perhaps
because of this belief— Catholic doctrine was more tolerantly dis-
posed toward the poor than was the case in some of the more
individualistic Protestant denominations. Moreover, in view of the
predominance of working-class families in many Catholic congrega-
tions, influential Catholic leaders such as Cardinal Gibbons recog-
nized that the Church could not afford to take an implacably hostile
attitude toward labor unions and collective bargaining.33 The papal
encyclical on the condition of the working class, Rerum novarum
(1891), condemned socialism and defended private property; but it
also upheld the principle of unionism, sanctioned moderate social
legislation, and denounced the tendency of laissez faire to treat labor
as a commodity to be bought cheaply and used hard.34

Clergy and laymen of all denominations were inspired by the
example of the Salvation Army to take a more sympathetic interest
in the people at the bottom of the social heap. A Boston settlement
worker, Robert A. Woods, observed that "more than any other type

Shifting Attitudes 29

of person in these days" members of General Booth's Army seemed
"moved by a passion for the outcast and distressed."35 The deeds
of soldiers of the Army and of the bonneted lassies who moved
"like sweet angels among the haunts of the lost" demonstrated to
respectable folk that even the most desperate and vicious of the
poor might be saved. No place was Godforsaken to the Army, no
man or woman sunk so low as to be excluded from God's bounty.36
In 1893 Josiah Strong wrote admiringly that "Probably during no
hundred years in the history of the world have there been saved
so many thieves, gamblers, drunkards, and prostitutes as during the
past quarter of a century through the heroic faith and labors of the
Salvation Army."37 The Army's dramatic and apparently successful
methods of dealing with the dangerous classes aroused new support
for slum evangelization in the old-line churches. As will be shown
in the next two chapters this work had not been wholly neglected
before General Booth's organization came to the United States, but
never before had the need and the opportunity been so effectively
publicized.

No less significant than the impetus the Salvation Army's work
gave to evangelical crusades was the interest it awakened in social
reform. Charles R. Henderson, professor of sociology at the Univer-
sity of Chicago, saw in the Army's program a salutary reminder
"that they who touch the soul must minister to the body, as Jesus
did."38 The publication in 1890 of General Booth's In Darkest
England (ghost written by the journalist William T. Stead) did
much to popularize the idea that the moral improvement of the poor
was dependent upon the amelioration of their economic condition.
This view, of course, was exactly the reverse of the individualistic
assumption that if only the poor could be taught to lead moral lives
their economic problems would disappear. The young economist
Richard T. Ely hailed the book as "a trumpet blast calling men to
action on behalf of the poorest and most degraded classes in modern
society."39 Booth himself was primarily concerned with the rescue
of souls, but he insisted that as a first step "society, which by its
habits, its customs, and its laws, has greased the slope down which
these poor creatures slide to perdition," must be brought to mend
its ways.40

At the close of the century political, economic, and religious

America Awakens to Poverty 30

influences were undermining popular allegiance to the individualistic
interpretation of poverty. The idea that want was primarily the result
of laziness, thriftlessness, and immorality was by no means moribund,
but to a considerable body of Americans this view no longer seemed
to square with the facts of real life. In its place there was emerging
a more sympathetic attitude toward the poor which frequently
descried persons in need as victims rather than as culprits.

CHAPTER 3

The Charitable Impulse

Give alms: the needy sink with pain;

The orphans mourn, the crushed complain.

Give freely: hoarded gold is curst,

A prey to robbers and to rust.

Christ, through his poor, a claim doth make,

Give gladly, for thy Saviour's sake.

Robert Hartley, Eighth Annual Report of
the New York Association for Improving
the Condition of the Poor, 1851.

Oh, pause in your pleasures, ye wealthy and grand, remember that

hunger's abroad;
Oh, turn to the needy and stretch forth a hand, oh, now listen to

sympathy's chord;
Its sweet holy strain encircles the soul, of the ragged, the fallen

and low;
So pause in your pleasures, seek charity's goal, when poverty's tears

ebb and flow.

Edward Harrigan, "Poverty's Tears Ebb
and Flow."

THROUGHOUT the nineteenth century the charitable response
of the American people was almost as generous as their pursuit
of gain was selfish. The two streams of giving and getting
converged, at the end of the century, in the gospel of wealth. This
doctrine harmonized with the major tenets of individualism and,
through the idea of stewardship, endowed individualism with moral
sanctity. Earlier writers had taken the stand that the rich were God's
agents in relieving the distress of the poor, but it was Andrew
Carnegie who in word and deed gave the gospel of wealth its
classic expression.1 Believing that enormous differences in the econo-
mic conditions of men were normal and beneficent, Carnegie asserted

America Awakens to Poverty 32

that wealth was a sacred trust to be administered by the person
possessing it for the welfare of the community. The aim of the
millionaire, he declared, should be to die poor.

There was an engaging, childlike quality in Carnegie's belief
that Robber Barons, in full career, would voluntarily convert them-
selves into Robin Hoods. It had the rosy aspect of a boy's daydream
in which the hero, after almost impossible feats of strength and
valor, seizes the pirate's gold and returns home to distribute it wisely
and justly among his deserving but timorous townsmen— with this
difference: Carnegie was a man and his dream had come true.

For all its undoubted romantic appeal the gospel of wealth added
nothing to the understanding of poverty and suggested no solution
to the problem other than the familiar one of self-help. The reason
for these failures is obvious. Carnegie was not seeking to correct
poverty but to justify wealth. His purpose was to demonstrate, as
convincingly as the case permitted, that socially irresponsible methods
of acquiring riches could be abundantly compensated for by liber-
ality in bestowing charity.

In a sense Carnegie's creed typifies the approach to social prob-
lems that prevailed during most of the nineteenth century. The
weakness of this approach lay in failure to recognize that the suffer-
ing society generously relieved with one hand was, in many instances,
but the product of the ills that it casually sowed with the other.
Consciousness of this fact came rather slowly, but its discovery was
the distinctive contribution of the nineteenth century to social wel-
fare. In large measure the discovery was the fruit of the labor of men
and women who gave their lives, not just their fortunes, to philan-
thropy.

The private charities of the nineteenth century usually sought
to provide the poor with moral instruction as well as material assist-
ance. Frequently their purpose was to relieve the distress of a
particular category of persons, such as the sick or widows with
small children, or to meet some special need of the destitute classes.
The establishment and maintenance of schools for poor boys and
girls were favorite forms of charity in the first part of the century,
and even after public-school systems had been inaugurated, philan-
thropic societies operated schools to train needy children in the

The Charitable Impulse 33

manual and household arts. During the depression of 1819 a corre-
spondent who signed himself "One of the People" offered a "Morsel
of Advisement to the Rich." Stop extorting and oppressing the poor,
he counseled; become "rich in good works," and "preserve your
treasures from being moth-eaten."2 In the eyes of many, however,
the sorest need of the poor was their want of religious guidance and
instruction. "Moral and Religious culture is the great blessing to be
bestowed on the poor," said William Ellery Channing.3 The "un-
churched poor" were indeed in precarious straits in a day when the
church was deemed a man's first resource, material as well as spiritual,
in time of trouble.

It was to serve the families who were not connected with any
religious group that the Unitarian clergyman, Joseph Tuckerman,
began his ministry at large in Boston in the dark days following the
depression of 1819. Until failing health caused his retirement in 1833
Tuckerman acted as pastor and friend to persons who, as he said,
had been "living as a caste, cut off from those in more favored
circumstances" and who, without his ministrations, would have been
"doomed to find their pleasures and sympathy in their sufferings
alone among themselves." Tuckerman was a Harvard classmate and
lifelong friend of Channing, and it was Channing who was primarily
responsible for his appointment as missionary to the poor.

As befitted a clergyman, Tuckerman was chiefly interested in
the spiritual welfare of his charges but, as a result of visiting the poor
in their homes, he became interested in a great many projects for
improving their environment and opportunities. Housing, wages,
education, delinquency, and relief all occupied his attention. From
his "Poor's Purse," derived from contributions from wealthy sup-
porters of his ministry, he gave charitable assistance to the needy,
not fulsomely but with a Yankee firmness; where possible he made
loans rather than outright gifts, sometimes exacting the pledge of a
coat or other article as security for the debt. He studied British and
continental works on poor relief, directed an investigation of the
Massachusetts poor law system for the state legislature in 1832, and
in 1834 brought about the establishment of an association to insure a
measure of cooperation among the twenty-odd benevolent societies
then operating in Boston. Tuckerman's contributions to the theory
and practice of charity were rediscovered at the close of the century

America Awakens to Poverty 34

by advocates of scientific philanthropy who learned that this unas-
suming minister had anticipated by more than half a century the
future course of social work in the United States.4

About the same time as Tuckerman was active in Boston, other
religiously inspired individuals and groups were attempting to
elevate the poor by printing and disseminating religious leaflets. In
the late 1820's organizations such as the New York Mission and
Tract Society were distributing moral literature on the docks and
in the markets as well as in jails and almshouses. During the thirties
the activities of the New York society were broadened to include
missionary labors for the salvation of souls of the poor in neglected
and degraded quarters of the city. Thereafter the Mission and Tract
Society employed a small but increasing number of city missionaries
(twelve in 1834, forty-five in 1866) who not only distributed tracts
but also conducted religious services in the slums and city institutions,
visited the poor in their homes, and sought to persuade them to
attend church and to send their children to Sunday schools. In
addition to their evangelical work the missionaries gave temporary
economic assistance to poor families and attempted to find jobs for
the unemployed.

Dr. John H. Griscom, whose study of The Sanitary Condition
of the Laboring Population of New York (1845) was based in part
on reports submitted by agents of the City Tract Society, believed
that the missionaries knew more about the actual condition of the
poor than any other persons. One of them informed him that the
poor of New York were living "in circumstances as unfavorable to
chastity and the common decencies of life as the Sandwich Islanders
were previous to the introduction of Christianity among them by
American missionaries."5 "Thank God!" rejoiced a feminine novelist
in the 1850's, "our people are coming to see that missionaries have a
work to do at home."6

The Roman Catholic Church, with its long experience in the
field of charity and its historic allegiance to the doctrine of good
works, gave its support to eleemosynary enterprises in the United
States at a comparatively early date. The Sisters of Charity of Saint
Vincent de Paul, who came to this country in 1809, were particularly
active in establishing hospitals and orphan homes; and the Little
Sisters of the Poor, founded in 1840, assumed the task of caring for
the aged poor. Members of the Society of Saint Vincent de Paul, a

The Charitable Impulse 35

layman's group that spread to America around 1850, visited the
sick and destitute of their parishes, inquired into and endeavored
to meet the needs of these unfortunates, promoted the religious and
elementary training of children, distributed moral and religious
books, and undertook any other philanthropic works that their
resources permitted.7

The most important single figure in American charity in the
middle third of the nineteenth century was Robert M. Hartley,
who served for more than thirty years as secretary of the New York
Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor. Born in
England in 1796, Hartley was brought to the United States in 1799.
His father was a wool manufacturer, and as a boy Hartley himself
worked in a woolen mill. It was during this youthful employment
that he launched his first crusade: an effort to induce his fellow
workers to substitute a debating society for gambling as their means
of recreation. He settled in New York in the early 1820's, and, after
a brief period as a salesman in a drygoods store, established himself
as a merchant.

Organization of the A.I.C.P. in 1843 was not Hartley's initial
venture in philanthropy but the culmination of nearly twenty years
of work in behalf of the poor. Deeply religious, he had volunteered
his services as a tract distributor shortly after his arrival in the city.
Finding that widespread intemperance among the poor nullified his
efforts to arouse their religious enthusiasm, Hartley became a leader
of the City Temperance Society. The total-abstinence movement
occupied most of his energies in the 1830's. Among his contributions
to the cause was a pamphlet entitled "Way to Make the Poor Rich."
He also visited distilleries, talked with owners and managers, and
attempted to make them realize the evils of their ways.

These visits failed to accomplish their original objective, but
they were nevertheless very enlightening to Hartley. In the course of
them he came upon filthy sheds in which hundreds of cows were
penned and fed upon distillery refuse. Horrified by the condition
of the animals, and convinced that milk from them was unfit for
human consumption, he traced sales of it to the homes of 25,000
tenement infants. Hartley's investigations led him to the conclusion
that there was a direct connection between the use of still milk and
the rise in infant mortality rates in New York in the preceding
twenty-five years— an increase all the more alarming since in other

America Awakens to Poverty 36

cities the rate had declined during the same period. The erstwhile
temperance reformer persevered in his crusade against distillery milk
until in 1864 the state legislature prohibited its sale.8

Hartley's investigation of the milk problem, to an even greater
extent than his earlier efforts on behalf of temperance and religious
instruction, acquainted him with the daily environment of the poor.
Familiarity with living conditions in the tenements helped him to
recognize the helplessness of the individual tenement dweller to
correct the situations that threatened the health and welfare of his
family and himself. Like nearly all the other workers for human
betterment in the nineteenth century, but earlier than most of them,
Hartley came to believe that the material condition of the poor
must be improved before their moral health could be restored.

The A.I.C.P. was a nonsectarian organization but, like the reli-
gious charities contemporary with it, it utilized the service of
"friendly visitors" to call upon and assist the needy. At the time of its
founding there were between thirty and forty charitable societies
already functioning in New York City. A number of them had been
organized to meet the extraordinary demands for help in the depres-
sion years of the late thirties and early forties. All of their resources
had been sorely taxed by that emergency, and, in the opinion of
some observers, their lax methods of dispensing aid had actually
encouraged the growth of pauperism. Hartley's hope was that
through the operation of the new organization the work of the
existing agencies would automatically be coordinated. His plan,
which was shortly copied in Brooklyn, Albany, and several other
communities, divided the city for charitable purposes into districts
coterminous with the political wards; these, in turn, were subdivided
into sections. An advisory committee supervised the Association's
work in each district, and a resident visitor carried on its activities
in each section. The visitors were all volunteers and all men. Their
work was to visit applicants for assistance living in their section,
ascertain the facts of the case, and provide the deserving with the aid
suited to their particular requirements. This might be either reference
to the appropriate public or private agency or a grant of coal, food,
or other necessities from A.I.C.P. funds. If the latter course were
followed, the visitor was expected to give the needy family encour-
agement and counsel along the path to rehabilitation.9

The path, as Hartley saw it, was piety, total abstinence, fru-

The Charitable Impulse 37

gality, and industry. In 1847 he issued Franklin's Way to Wealth
for distribution to the poor by the friendly visitors. Finding the
original "wanting in religious sentiment and feeling," Hartley took
the liberty to revise it by "inserting a few appropriate texts." The
Economist, also issued in 1847, gave instruction on the preparation
of nutritious, inexpensive meals; and advised that 12 1/2 cents a day
spent on drink amounted to $45.62 a year— a sum ample to buy three
tons of coal, one load of wood, two barrels of flour, 200 pounds of
Indian meal, 200 pounds of pork, and eight bushels of potatoes.
"Into a house thus supplied," Hartley said, "hunger and cold could
not enter. And if to these articles is added what before [the laborer]
has felt able to purchase, abundance and comfort would be the
inmates of his dwelling."10

The primary function of the A.I.C.P. was to render service to
individual families, but almost from the beginning it undertook what
Hartley styled "incidental labors" for improving general social con-
ditions, especially those relating to housing, health, and child welfare.
In the second year of the Association's existence Hartley made a
study of cellar tenements and issued a report branding the housing
of the poor as morally debasing and, because of high rents, econo-
mically oppressive. In 1853 the Association made another and more
comprehensive housing survey. This time Hartley published a thirty-
two-page pamphlet describing the deplorable conditions brought to
light by the survey.11 His campaign for better housing led to the
appointment of the first State Legislative Commission to investigate
the tenement problem in the metropolis. Under Hartley's direction
the Association essayed "a complete social, moral, and statistical
census" of the congested area lying between Rivington and Four-
teenth streets east of Avenue B.12 It erected model tenements, built
and operated a public bath and laundry, founded two dispensaries
and a hospital for the treatment of crippled children; it was active
in the campaign for compulsory school attendance laws and the
appointment of truant officers; and it was tireless in its espousal of
measures for promoting personal hygiene and public sanitation.13

Hartley sympathized with the distress imposed on the poor by
the miserable environment the city offered them. He condemned
the community's failure to provide even the elementary conditions
of decent existence for thousands of its citizens. But he also criticized
the poor for their refusal to leave the city. He thought they made

America Awakens to Poverty 38

their sad plight still worse by congregating in the slums, accepting
idleness as their lot and charity as their due, and suffering their chil-
dren to grow up— or die prematurely— in vicious surroundings. In
The Mistake (1850) he addressed the poor:

Many of you left your native country and came to this land of
plenty, to escape from poverty and starvation. But if you lodge like
driftwood where you land, exposed to disease in filthy courts and
damp cellars, and eke out a precarious existence by alms, in what
respect have you benefited?

Hartley was second to none in confidence that self-help and
the West were sufficient to solve the major part of the nation's
poverty problem. "Providence has bestowed upon us a vast extent
of unoccupied territorial surface, with a fertile soil and genial
climate," he thankfully observed. "If the hale and vigorous cannot
earn their subsistence here, they should earn it elsewhere." In his
opinion, the greatest kindness that could be shown the poor was "to
cause them, if necessary by rigorous measures, to choose the interior
for their home, where, by honest industry, they may recover self-
respect and independence, and become blessings instead of burdens
to the country."14 His invariable counsel to the poor was

Escape then from the city— for escape is your only recourse against
the terrible ills of beggary; and the further you go, the better ... a
few dollars will take you hundreds of miles, where, with God's
blessing on willing hearts and strong hands, you will find health,
competence, and prosperity.15

Reduced to its essence, Hartley's advice to the poor amounted
to little more than this: Go somewhere else.

Charles Loring Brace was another mid-century reformer who
regarded the West as the ultimate solution to the social problems of
crowded cities. Brace had studied for the ministry, and in the late
1840's he was working as a missionary to the prisoners on Blackwell's
Island and "the squalid poor" of the Five Points of New York City.
His introduction to the neglected children of the metropolis, whom
he was later to call the most threatening members of "the dangerous
classes," came in 1848 when he began to participate in a series of
religious services for street boys. After several years Brace concluded
that evangelical efforts, although meritorious, were not in themselves
adequate to cope with a situation of extraordinary seriousness.

The Charitable Impulse 39

The problem that gradually unfolded before him was not just
poor homes, but no homes at all for thousands of vagrant children.
According to a police report in 1852 there were an estimated 10,000
abandoned, orphaned, or runaway children roaming the streets of
New York. They slept in old boilers, boxes and privies, on barges
and steps, and, especially, on steam gratings. Mrs. Elizabeth Oakes
Smith wrote of their life in her novel The Newsboy (1854), ex-
pressing both pity for boys grown prematurely old and crafty, and
admiration for their "sturdy individualism and unapproachable self-
reliance."16 To Brace, however, the homeless children seemed to bear
to the respectable population of the city the same relation as wild
Indians to Western settlers.

They had no settled home [he wrote], and lived on the outskirts of
society, their hand against every man's pocket, and every man look-
ing upon them as natural enemies; their wits sharpened like those of
a savage and their principles often no better.17

Consistent with the current spirit of individualism, Brace disliked
the idea of institutional care for children. "The best of all Asylums
for the outcast child," he asserted, "is the jarmer's home"1* One of
the major purposes of the Children's Aid Society, which he organized
in 1853, was to procure foster homes for New York's vagrant boys
and girls in rural districts. Promoting emigration, however, was not
the sole aim of the Society, but rather the final step in what Brace
called the program of "moral disinfection." The first step was the
assignment of a visitor or paid agent to a given neighborhood. It was
his duty to learn all he could about the area, and to make himself
acquainted with the children and their problems. The next move was
to conduct informal religious exercises for boys of the neighborhood.
In time, if circumstances warranted and resources were available,
the Society established a free reading room, an industrial school (for
children who were "too poor, too ragged, and undisciplined for the
public schools"), and lodginghouses for newsboys and other home-
less working children. Eventually, through vacation and convalescent
homes, and a sick children's mission employing twelve doctors and
four nurses to visit sick children in their homes, the original program
was significantly broadened.19

The most promising cases discovered in the Society's varied
activities were induced, where possible, to accept foster homes in the
country. Applications for children poured into Brace's headquarters

America Awakens to Poverty 40

in response to circulars printed in newspapers in the hinterland. In
its first twenty years of operation the Children's Aid Society trans-
ported an average of almost one thousand children a year to rural
communities in New York, adjacent states, and the West. The emi-
grants moved in companies of from twenty to forty; when they
arrived at a designated town they were welcomed by a committee of
local citizens who supervised their placement in farmers' homes. As
Brace acknowledged, the success of the emigration feature of "moral
disinfection" was in part the result of the demand for cheap agricul-
tural labor. The children received board and room, and the farmers
obtained new hands to help with the planting, hoeing, and house-
work.20

The important task, as Brace saw it, was to get the vagrant
children out of the city; he assumed that once the children were
placed in an environment providing them with more wholesome
influences and offering them better opportunities for individual
advancement, the future would take care of itself. In practice, some
of the children did not adjust readily to rural life and labor; irate
Westerners sometimes complained that the Children's Aid Society
was turning loose a horde of city hoodlums on the countryside and
filling Western reformatories and jails with the scum of New York.
In response to these objections the Society eventually discontinued
the practice of sending older children to the country. Brace admitted
that in some instances bad habits acquired on the city streets had
become so deeply ingrained that even a radical change in environ-
ment could not eliminate them. He maintained, however, that in the
vast majority of cases the transplanted children had become useful
members of their adopted communities. Later investigators, upon
checking the individual records of the emigrants, were inclined to
agree that the net results of the removal policy were amazingly
successful.21

Brace was a young man in his middle twenties when he helped
to organize the Children's Aid Society; he remained executive officer
of the Society for almost forty years. His own accounts of his work
sometimes give the modern reader the impression that he was
describing the capture of sparrows rather than the rescue of children.
Yet he was probably more effective, and certainly more active, than
any other figure of his generation in calling attention to the problem
of neglected youth and in popularizing the idea of home as opposed

The Charitable Impulse 41

to institutional care of orphans.22 By his work and writings, which
included descriptive articles on homeless children, essays on charity
and reform, news items and editorials, Brace awakened large numbers
of persons to the urgency of the problem of child vagrancy. Subse-
quent reformers who attacked the evils of child labor would be able
to use the interest and concern Brace had aroused as a foundation
for their efforts to take the children out of the factories, as he had
sought to take them off the streets.

The Young Men's Christian Association, which was brought to
America about the same time as the organization of the Children's
Aid Society, addressed itself to a problem that was related to, but
quite distinct from, the one with which Brace wrestled. Like the
Children's Aid Society, the Y.M.C.A. worked with a group that was,
in a sense, homeless, but its clientele was older and belonged to a
higher economic level. The Y.M.C.A.'s concern was with uprooted
youths who had reversed Brace's pattern and emigrated from the
countryside to the city. Its functions were to provide a substitute
for the friendly and familiar moral influences from which young
men had been cut off by their removal to the cities, and to protect
them against the dangers of irreligion, intemperance, and immorality.

The evangelical emphasis of some of the local Associations fre-
quently involved them in a variety of general religious and welfare
work. Their activities were so diversified that the historian of the
Y.M.C.A. movement has noted that in its first decades the organiza-
tion functioned as "a sort of cooperating agency for the advance-
ment of any good work that any good man thought ought to be
prosecuted." As late as 1874 relief ranked second only to the conver-
sion of young men in the program of numerous local Associations.
Most of them had a committee in charge of relief which supervised
the distribution of money and clothing to poor families; not a few
maintained soup kitchens during the depression of 1873; and some
provided breakfasts and religious services on Sunday mornings to
homeless men who had spent the night in police stations. Until other
organizations had become strong enough to take over the work, the
Associations in Washington and Chicago coordinated the relief and
welfare facilities of their communities. In 1867 the Chicago "Y"
reported that it was fast becoming "a society for the improvement
of the condition of the poor, physical[ly] and morally," and that its

America Awakens to Poverty Ail

Relief Committee was seeking to impress upon all connected with
its work that "our mission is not only to relieve the suffering but to
improve the morals of those who are aided by us."23 The Y.M.C.A.
gradually limited its activities to work for young men and left the
field of general philanthropy to other organizations. Service on the
relief committees of the local Associations during the fifties and
sixties nevertheless familiarized many serious young men with the
conditions of the less fortunate and gave them at least a rudimentary
training in charitable work.24

The Y.M.C.A.s also contributed to the development of the
survey technique that was later to be widely used in social work.
As a means of improving their program, and also as a basis for their
appeals for funds, the Associations collected data on religious and
moral influences in their cities. At first the surveys were limited to
such matters as church membership, church attendance, and Sabbath
observance, but by the 1860's they were being broadened to include
information on tenements, saloons, brothels, sanitary facilities, recrea- ,
tional opportunities, and other factors affecting young men in urban
communities. Conscientious secretaries upon assuming new positions
made fresh studies of the localities which their Associations served.
No doubt in order to prepare themselves for such assignments,
students at the Y.M.C.A. college in Springfield, Massachusetts, formed
a club to train themselves in gathering and interpreting survey data.25
\^-The Y.M.C.A. was therefore one of the pioneer agencies active in
compiling factual information on urban social conditions; and it is
worth noting that the surveys it sponsored were intended not to be
of academic interest only, but to serve as a foundation for corrective
action.

The Civil War affected the problem of poverty in multifarious
ways. War and postwar political issues distracted attention tem-
porarily from fundamental social questions and thereby postponed
efforts at their solution. At the same time, however, the war destroyed
slavery and thus removed from the arena of public debate the issue
that had long overshadowed concern with poverty. To the North it
brought a blood-born prosperity which temporarily eased economic
tensions and gave nearly all classes a taste of greater material abun-
dance than ever before. Yet it impoverished the South; and by
accelerating the process of industrialization and encouraging both

The Charitable Impulse 43

urbanization and immigration it transformed poverty from a local to
a national problem. It accentuated the contrast between the condi-
tions of the rich and poor and, in so doing, created an atmosphere
of discontent and unrest. In particular, the war stimulated charities
and greatly influenced their subsequent development.

During the war, members of the armed forces, their dependents,
the freedmen, and other war sufferers were the recipients of char-
itable gifts of unprecedented magnitude. The United States Sanitary
Commission and the United States Christian Commission, both feder-
ations of numerous voluntary associations, supplemented the work
of government agencies in meeting the physical and spiritual needs
of soldiers and sailors. The Sanitary Commission, which at one time
had 500 agents in the field with Union troops, sent bandages, lint,
clothing, and food to battlefields and encampments; it organized
hospital units, established lodginghouses for men on furlough, pro-
vided receptions and meals to soldiers at railway stations, and main-
tained facilities to assist servicemen with claims for pay. The Christian
Commission, closely allied to the Y.M.C.A., but also supported by
numerous religious groups, furnished volunteer ministers to army
camps, distributed Bibles, tracts, and books to the troops, and con-
tributed stores of material relief similar to the goods provided by the
Sanitary Commission.26

Dependents of fighting men received assistance on an even more
generous scale. Volunteers' families were rewarded with gifts raised
by community subscriptions, and in addition they often obtained
aid from state and county funds. Bounties offered for enlistment
were intended, in part, as a form of relief for the enlistees' families.
The national government, states, and municipalities paid out an
estimated $600,000,000 in bounty money during the war, and indi-
viduals raised an additional $100,000,000 for this purpose.

Contributions for the aid of combatants and their families by
no means exhausted the charitable impulse. The National Freedmen's
Relief Association and similar philanthropic groups endeavored to
ease the immediate distress of the unsettled Negro population and
also to inaugurate educational facilities to train them to become
self-supporting. In somewhat similar fashion the American Union
Commission provided destitute Union sympathizers in, or refugees
from, the South with clothing, shelter, financial help, and aid in
obtaining employment.

America Awakens to Poverty 44

The exigencies of the war and the easy prosperity that accom-
panied it in the North accustomed numerous Americans to the habit
of contributing generously to philanthropy. Furthermore, the war
experience familiarized many persons who had hitherto looked upon
charity as an individual or church obligation with the practice of
making their gifts to the unfortunate indirectly, through the agency
of secular welfare organizations. To a certain extent the war made
Americans as a whole more cognizant of the impersonal causes of
destitution operating in society, and war work acquainted some of
them with the necessity of ministering to the physical wants of the
suffering as well as to their spiritual needs. A Sanitary Commission
official reported that medical attention was the chief need of the
freedmen in a hastily improvised, overcrowded, and insanitary camp.
"There are already teachers, missionaries, and chaplains enough in
the field," he wrote; "without physicians there will soon be no
scholars for the teacher to teach or souls for the missionary to save."27

As a direct consequence of generous bounty payments and
public assistance to dependents of servicemen, local tax rates and
assessments increased rapidly during the war period. This fact, plus
well-merited suspicion of the honesty and ability of many public
officials, confirmed the conviction of the propertied classes that "indis-
criminate giving" was unwise and that public administration of relief
was costly and inefficient. On the other hand, the war gave added
luster to the principle of meeting emergency needs through voluntary
associations, contributions, and service. The great war commissions
not only seemed relatively effective but, perhaps more important,
emotionally satisfying. They mobilized the charitable resources of
the North, especially the militant energies of aroused womanhood.

The example of heroic self-sacrifice on the part of the young
men who volunteered for the war kindled a desire for reciprocal
service in the hearts of their sisters. Josephine Shaw, then a girl of
nineteen, wrote in her diary on October 25, 1862:

We, as a Nation, are learning splendid lessons of heroism and forti-
tude through it [the war] that nothing else could teach. All our
young men who take their lives in their hands and go out and battle
for the right grow noble and grand in the act, and when they come
back (perhaps only half of those who went) I hope they will find
that the women have grown with them in the agony. . . . Dear boys!
How noble they are, and yet how can they help being noble? I have

The Charitable Impulse 45

longed so to go myself that it seemed unbearable. . . . We can work
though even if we can't enlist, and we do.28

For countless American women war-relief work was an eman-
cipating experience. After the war a number of them were unwilling
to retire serenely to the management of households. For some of them
this was impossible, for their husbands, or the young men who might
have married them, did not come back. Those war-bereft women
carried forward into the new times the fervor for helpful service that
had been awakened in the trial of the Union. They were the fore-
runners, and often in a literal sense the teachers, of that later genera-
tion of "dedicated old maids" of the Progressive era who also devoted
their lives to assisting the unfortunate.

CHAPTER 4

The Rise of Social Work

The great problem of all charity, public or private, is how to
diminish suffering without increasing, by the very act, the number of
paupers; how to grant aid, in case of need, without obliterating the
principle of self-reliance and self-help.

Frederick H. Wines, Secretary, Board of Public
Charities of the State of Illinois,
Second Biennial Report, 1872.

But because we cannot do all we wish are we to do nothing? Even
as things are, something can be accomplished. Is no life-boat to put
out, and no life-belt to be thrown, because only a half dozen out of
the perishing hundreds can be saved from the wreck?

London Congregational Union,

The Bitter Cry of Outcast London.

Public Relief and Scientific Philanthropy

PUBLIC poor relief was in bad repute in nineteenth-century
America. Some observers, such as Josephine Shaw Lowell, attrib-
uted the disgraceful condition of almshouses at the close of the
Civil War to the preoccupation of earlier reformers with the slavery
issue. Even more directly, however, public indifference toward the
helpless stemmed from the emphasis upon individual self-help which
was the religion of the respectable in the vigorous young republic.
The energies of the common man, so long smothered in older caste-
ridden nations, were concentrated in America on demonstrating the
worth and rewards of hard work in a free and fortunately endowed
society. There was so much work to be done, so many opportunities
for the competent to seize, that noblesse oblige was often deemed a

The Rise of Social Work 47

relic of outworn aristocracies. The incompetent, no matter what the
reason for their disability, seemed at best a burden on the community.

The aim of public relief in the nineteenth century was to prevent
starvation and death from exposure as economically as possible.
Sometimes, as in the case of the elderly sisters of whom Sarah Orne
Jewett wrote in "The Town Poor," this meant that public authorities
auctioned the destitute to the person who demanded the smallest
sum for their care.1 Under this practice, which a writer in 1860
called private enterprise in human stock, the low bidder sought to
make a profit out of the transaction by skimping on the housing,
fuel, food, and clothing furnished his charges.2 Indenture was an even
more economical method of dealing with the poor. In the early
years of the century it was not uncommon to "bind out" idle or
vagrant adults to labor for and under the supervision of respectable
citizens.3 Until about 1875 indenture continued to be a favorite
means of providing for the custody and instruction of orphaned or
otherwise destitute children.4

The ideal of economical administration was often defeated in
practice because relief was managed by politicians who were apt to
be kindhearted, inefficient, or corrupt— or all three. Public assistance
to the poor in their homes in the form of donations of coal or pay-
ment of rent was so haphazardly administered that reformers agitated,
often successfully, for its complete cessation.5 But it was not only
of maladministration that reformers complained: they were opposed
to public outdoor (i.e., noninstitutional) relief in principle. Mrs.
Lowell wrote in 1883 that the system of public support of paupers
in their own homes was, if possible, less defensible than "openly
advocated communism"; for "the principle underlying it is not that
the proceeds of all men's labor is to be fairly divided among all, but
that the idle, improvident, and even vicious man has the right to
live in idleness and vice upon the proceeds of the labor of his indus-
trious and virtuous fellow citizen."6

Mrs. Lowell and the other Americans who shared her views on
public relief borrowed their ideas from the English poor-law re-
formers. They maintained that public assistance should be granted,
not only sparingly, but grudgingly; it should be available only in
institutions and dispensed only in ways that would discourage people
from seeking it. Mrs. Lowell admitted the community's obligation

America Awakens to Poverty 48

to "save every one of its members from starvation, no matter how
low or depraved such member may be," but she contended that

the necessary relief should be surrounded by circumstances that shall
not only repel everyone, not in extremity, from accepting it, but
which shall also insure a distinct moral and physical improvement on
the part of all those who are forced to have recourse to it— that is,
discipline and education should be inseparably associated with any
system of public relief.7

In the institutions which she envisaged the inmates would be required
to work, exercise, and sleep "as much or as little as is good for
them"; and be brought under the influence of "physical, moral,
mental, and industrial training." When cured of the disease of
pauperism by this strict discipline, they would be released to take
their places as useful and independent citizens.8

No institutions of this type existed in the United States when
Mrs. Lowell wrote. There were tax-supported almshouses, but these
were better calculated to degrade than to reform their inhabitants;
and commitment of a family to them had a tendency to transform
temporary misfortune into permanent poverty. Throughout the
better (or worse) part of the century public almshouses remained
exile colonies of all categories of the homeless and helpless. They
were social pesthouses in which an undifferentiated collection of
discards including the aged, the blind, the insane, feeble-minded
persons, epileptics, alcoholics, orphans, foundlings, and chronic
paupers were crowded together, as the novelist Edward Eggleston
observed, "like chickens in a coop."9 Not infrequently hospitals and
poorhouses were located side by side, or even placed in the same
building.10

Before the Civil War control of almshouses, as of other provi-
sions for public assistance, was in the hands of local officials. Town-
ship, county, and city officials administered indoor and outdoor relief
without supervision from state authorities except as their activities
might be scrutinized by grand juries or investigated by legislative
commissions. During the 1860's, however, the more progressive states
began to appoint permanent boards to inspect, report on, and suggest
improvements in public charities, particularly reformatories, asylums,
and almshouses.11

The reports of the state boards provided almost the first com-

The Rise of Social Work 49

prehensive and authoritative information on conditions in public
institutions. Without exception they condemned the undifferentiated
almshouse. In 1869 the newly appointed Ohio board called attention
to the plight of the nearly one thousand children incarcerated in
the county poorhouses:

What is to be done with them? Think of their surroundings. The
raving of the maniac, the frightful contortions of the epileptic, the
driveling and senseless sputtering of the idiot, the garrulous temper
of the decrepit, neglected old age, the peevishness of the infirm, the
accumulated filth of all these; then add the moral degeneracy of
[those who] from idleness or dissipation, seek a refuge from honest
toil in the tithed industry of the country, and you have a faint out-
line of the surroundings of these little boys and girls. This is home
to them. Here their first and most enduring impressions of life are
formed.12

Frederick H. Wines of the Illinois board stated in 1872 that he
and the other members had found conditions in the county alms-
houses which were almost too shocking to describe— "nakedness, filth,
starvation, vice, and utter wretchedness, which a very slight exercise
of common sense and of humanity might have entirely prevented."
He called these institutions "living tombs."13 Several years later
William P. Letchworth reported equally deplorable conditions in
New York poorhouses. Of a group of boys housed in the laundry
of one of the institutions he wrote:

They were intermingled with the inmates of the wash-house, around
the cauldrons where the dirty clothes were being boiled. Here was
an insane woman raving and uttering wild gibberings, a half-crazy
man was sardonically grinning, and an overgrown idiotic boy of
malicious disposition was teasing, I might say torturing, one of the
little boys. There were several other adults of low types of hu-
manity. The apartment . . . overhead was used for a sleeping room,
and the floor was being scrubbed at the same time by one of the not
over careful inmates; it was worn, and the dirty water came through
the cracks in continuous droppings upon the heads of the little ones,
who did not seem to regard it as a serious annoyance. . . .

None of the children in this institution attended school.14

In several states the work of the official boards was supplemented
by private associations. Wines of Illinois urged "the better class of
citizens in each county" to form voluntary societies for the purpose
of conducting a monthly investigation of jails and almshouses.15

America Awakens to Poverty 50

Visiting committees for public hospitals had already been established
in a few cities as an outgrowth of war-relief work; and in 1872
Louisa Lee Schuyler, whose philanthropic activities embraced service
in the Children's Aid Society, the Sanitary Commission, and the
Bellevue Hospital Visiting Committee, helped organize the New
York State Charities Aid Association.16 This society, and similar
ones later founded in other states, promoted the organization of local
visiting committees which made more frequent inspections of the
almshouses than the state board could undertake, and kept the
management of the institutions under constant and thorough sur-
veillance.

Edward Eggleston's The Hoosier Schoolmaster, published in
1871, may well have aided in recruiting members for these local
visiting committees. A miserably administered poorhouse in the
backwoods of Indiana figured prominently in the story, and the
author interrupted his narrative to assert that conditions were equally
bad in almshouses in other parts of the country, including wealthy
New York State. Eggleston assigned the blame for these conditions
impartially to the dishonesty of county officials and the indifference
of the prosperous churchgoing people of the community. The
former corruptly allowed claims for repairs to the institution that
were never made; the latter were so occupied in sending old clothes
to the heathen of the South Sea Islands and the Five Points of wicked
New York City that they were blind to the sorrow and poverty
within their own reach.17

The combined efforts of the state boards and their volunteer
adjuncts brought about some improvement in the almshouses, par-
ticularly in the removal of children and the mentally and physically
disabled to specialized institutions. Nevertheless, undifferentiated
almshouses were still in existence in parts of the country in the
1890's. As late as 1900 only one fourth of the states had passed laws
providing for the removal of children from the poorhouses, and even
in these states the laws were not fully enforced.18

While public aid to the poor was neglected, or even regarded
with downright hostility, private charity flourished. Those who
favored ending public relief outside almshouses and infirmaries argued
that private benevolence was adequate to succor the needy who were
not so completely dependent as to require institutional care. Pauper-

The Rise of Social Work 51

ism and taxation were the twin bugbears of most nineteenth-century
philanthropists. They wished to improve the poorhouses, but not to
such an extent that people would cease dreading to be sent to them.
They wanted to help the unemployed and the deserving poor, but
not to be so kind about it that those groups would be tempted into
permanent dependency. They yearned to feed the hungry and warm
the cold— but they suspected that many persons who seemed to be
famishing and freezing were actually impostors. They desired to do
what was necessary to relieve suffering in an efficient, economical,
and businesslike manner, and they wanted to do it by means of
voluntary contributions and services rather than through tax-sup-
ported benevolence. It seemed to them— that is, to the well-to-do
persons who had the leisure and resources to indulge in voluntary
charitable work— that what the poor most needed was assistance in
developing good character. In their scale of values, good character
meant, first and foremost, ability to support oneself.

The charity organization movement, originating in 1869, in
London, seemed such a practical method of obtaining the desired
end of efficiency in dispensing aid to the poor that it was widely
and rapidly copied in American cities. Like the various Associations
for Improving the Condition of the Poor, which Hartley and others
had established a generation earlier, the new Charity Organization
Societies, or Associated Charities, as they were called in some cities,
sought to foster a better administration of private charitable activities.
The methods of the new movement, reflecting the changes wrought
in business management in the intervening years, were somewhat
different and, presumably, more scientific. The program of the
charity organization societies was to coordinate the work of the
numerous and occasionally competing philanthropic organizations
already in existence, encourage the investigation of appeals for assist-
ance, prevent duplication of effort by different groups, discover
impostors, and suppress mendicancy. The goal of the movement was
to husband the private charitable resources of the community so that
money, instead of being dissipated on unworthy applicants, would
be available to give adequate assistance to all worthy cases.19

Originally the charity organization societies were not relief
agencies at all. They furnished no aid themselves, but were simply
bureaus of information and investigation. Applicants for assistance
who could pass the rigid examinations to which C.O.S. agents

America Awakens to Poverty 52

subjected them were certified as worthy and referred to one of the
cooperating agencies for the relief of their needs. Thus, when prospec-
tive contributors to the New York C.O.S. asked Mrs. Lowell how
much of their donation would go to the poor, she was able to answer
proudly, "Not one cent."20

Circumstances eventually made it necessary for the charity
organization societies to furnish relief from their own funds, but
they continued to require candidates for assistance to prove their
worthiness. In cases where a loan rather than an outright gift seemed
appropriate, the New York C.O.S. referred applicants to its Provi-
dent Loan Society. This was, in effect, a pawnshop that charged half
the legal rate of interest.21 Where possible a work test was applied
to alms seekers. In New York the Society maintained a woody ard:
donors to the project received tickets which they, in turn, gave to
men who asked them for aid; the bearers of the tickets took them to
the woodyard, where they sawed or split wood for a designated
number of hours, receiving, in exchange for their labor, bed, break-
fast, and dinner. It is perhaps worth noting that among the members
of the committee that supervised this enterprise was Clarence S. Day,
the author of Life with Father.22

Like the earlier movements in the direction of scientific philan-
thropy, the charity organization societies placed great emphasis
upon the use of volunteers to visit, counsel, and instruct the poor;
but where the A.I.C.P. had relied exclusively on men to do this
work, the new organizations encouraged qualified women to engage
in friendly visiting. By 1892 women far outnumbered men among
the 4,000 volunteers enrolled in charity organization work in the
United States.23 Whether male or female, friendly visitors were
expected to be combination detectives and moral influences. They
were to ascertain the reason for the applicants' need and to help
them overcome it. Their function was not to help the poor obtain
charitable assistance, but by advice and example to stimulate them
to become self-supporting. The premise of the friendly visitor's work
was that some personal weakness of character, intellect, or body
ordinarily redounded to the distress of the poor; only if those weak-
nesses were discovered and the sufferer induced to correct them
could progress be made toward individual independence.

C.O.S. offices were repositories of the voluminous reports pre-
pared by friendly visitors on the basis of their observation and inter-

The Rise of Social Work 53

rogation of alms seekers. Each office contained a city-wide registry
of names and addresses of individuals or families receiving assistance
from the cooperating societies. One of the objectives was to compile
a dossier on every person who had received or even asked for assist-
ance. Officers of the organization strove to induce the police to be
more stringent in campaigns against vagrants and beggars, and they
lobbied in city halls and state legislatures against measures authorizing
the free distribution of coal and other outdoor relief to the needy.

The charity organization movement and the scientific philan-
thropy it fostered were subjected to criticism from many sources.
Boston's Irish- American poet, John Boyle O'Reilly, wrote scathingly
of

The organized charity scrimped and iced
In the name of a cautious, statistical Christ.24

William T. Stead observed that nothing could be more admirable
than the principles to which the societies were dedicated, and few
things less satisfactory than the way in which they were conducted.25
The conscientiousness with which agents of the local societies applied
the doctrine of self-help often left them open to charges of harshness.
At one point in the best seller, Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch
(1901), that long-suffering widow was so overburdened that she
was tempted to register for aid with "The Organization." Jim, her
thirteen-year-old son, objected:

"Not yet, ma!" he said firmly. "It 'ud be with us like it was with the
Hornbys; they didn't have no thin' to eat, an' they went to the or-
ganization an' the man asted 'em if they had a bed or table, 'an when
they said yes, he said, Veil why don't you sell 'em!' "26

Poor Jim was such a believer in self-help that, rather than ask the
rich society for assistance, he literally worked himself to death.

William Dean Howells also protested against the heartlessness
of organized charity and the pharisaical spirit which he thought
characterized its operations. Why should we be so hard on the poor,
he asked, when we know by personal experience and statistics that
thousands cannot obtain work and must suffer unless they beg?
"Perhaps," he suggested, "it would be a fair division of the work if
we let the deserving rich give only to the deserving poor, and kept
the undeserving poor for ourselves who, if we are not rich, are not
deserving either."27

America Awakens to Poverty 54

As a trustee of the Cleveland C.O.S. Frederic C. Howe received
a letter from a local clergyman denouncing the organization for its
capitalistic bias and predilection to measure worthiness by business
standards.

Your society [wrote the clergyman], with its board of trustees
made up of steel magnates, coal operators, and employers is not
really interested in charity. If it were, it would stop the twelve-hour
day; it would increase wages and put an end to the cruel killing and
maiming of men. It is interested in getting its own wreckage out of
sight. It isn't pleasant to see it begging on the streets.

I doubt, as I read my New Testament, whether the Twelve
Disciples would have been able to qualify as worthy according to
your system. And Christ himself might have been turned over by
you to the police department as a "vagrant without visible means of
support."

Howe himself began to wonder whether charity, as practiced by
the Society, was not "a business enterprise, designed to keep poverty
out of sight and make life more comfortable for the rich."28

Part of the criticism of the charity organization movement
stemmed from hostility to the growing professionalization of welfare
work. During the eighties and nineties paid workers began to sup-
plant volunteers as friendly visitors. In many communities there were
simply not enough well-to-do ladies and gentlemen able and willing
to give time day after day to difficult and arduous assignments in
the slums.29 The volunteers gradually retired to advisory and fund-
raising committees, leaving the actual "case work" more and more in
the hands of the professionals. Persons who were accustomed to think
of charity as primarily a personal obligation regarded the notion that
aid might be more efficiently dispensed by "paid clerks" as a heretical
innovation. Advocates of one-hundred-per-cent charity were dis-
tressed by the fact that a portion of the money raised by contributions
for the relief of the poor was used to pay salaries to persons who
doled out the assistance. Men and women who gave slight thought
to the hardships that may have resulted from their own neglect of
charitable obligations and opportunities were outraged at reports
of officious and inquisitorial conduct on the part of professional
social workers.

Misunderstanding of the purpose of charity organization was
another source of complaint against the movement. Unquestionably,

The Rise of Social Work 55

in many cases, the harshness of the charity agents reflected their
narrow experience and limited sympathies. In many other instances,
however, their apparent hardness was simply the result of a sincere
effort to do a difficult task in a competent manner. Their respon-
sibility, as the agents saw it, was to help the poor, really help them—
not just to give them food, clothing, coal, or alms to tide them over
one emergency after another. Perhaps it was presumptuous to think
and talk about "elevating" the victims of poverty, and yet it was a
distinct advance in social thought to recognize that poverty was an
abnormal condition, that it was unnecessary, that it was curable, and
that its treatment required more fundamental changes than an in-
crease in generosity on the part of the rich.

No one accused charity agents of radicalism; and yet, in the long
run, their work undermined many cherished opinions regarding the
cause and cure of poverty. The first and essential duty of case work-
ers was to get the facts about the condition of persons who asked
for charity. Writers such as Howells might take an occasional
"East-Side Ramble" or Stephen Crane conduct an infrequent "Ex-
periment in Misery," but it was the charity agents' daily job to
collect and report data on the income, housing, employment, health,
and habits of the depressed classes. It was their business to concern
themselves with the welfare of widows and dependent children,
aged persons, homeless men, vagrant boys, and wayward girls. When
they went into a tenement it was not in search of "color" but to
gather the plain gray facts about number of rooms, number of
persons occupying them, possibility of ventilation, availability and
condition of sinks and toilets— and the rent. In their investigations
into the "worthiness" of a "case" they uncovered information about
unemployment, industrial accidents, sickness, wages, and family ex-
penditures. In nearly every city of any size these trained or partially
trained observers compiled a fund of more reliable and compre-
hensive data on the economic and social problems of the very poor
than had been available since the days of the close-knit village
economy.30

In addition to specific information, agents of the organized
charities contributed a technique of social research. The "case
method" which they perfected was an attempt to treat each family
or individual as a unique problem. This meant the rejection of pre-
conceived notions about "the poor," "the depraved classes," or "the

America Awakens to Pooerty 56

oppressed," and the substitution of efforts to discover pertinent and
significant data about particular family histories. Case workers did
not always succeed in emancipating themselves from prejudices of
one sort or another any more than other social scientists did; but they
worked with more concrete issues, and the inevitable tendency of
scientific philanthropy was to emphasize an objective and factual
rather than a deductive approach to the problems at hand.31

Even before the 1890's, and increasingly thereafter, social
scientists utilized the facilities of charity organization societies in
their research. At Johns Hopkins University Richard T. Ely assigned
one of his graduate students, John R. Commons, to the Baltimore
C.O.S. as a case worker and required him to report on his activities
to the joint history and economics seminar.32 During the nineties
Columbia College and the New York C.O.S. entered into an agree-
ment whereby Columbia's political-science students did field work
in the Society's districts and obtained access to its files for statistical
research. Simultaneously a committee on statistics of the New York
C.O.S. prepared analyses of case records and compiled reports on
homeless men and unemployment on the basis of data in the Society's
files.33 Amos G. Warner in studying the causes of poverty and John
Koren in considering the economic aspects of the liquor problem
both based their statistics on reports of the agents of the organized
charities.34 Similarly the records and reports of the charity organiza-
tion societies provided a mass of documentary evidence to students
of the housing of low-income groups.35

Beginning as the expression of a somewhat narrow, moralistic,
and individualistic attitude toward poverty, the charity organization
movement ultimately fostered the development of a more broadly
social point of view. The obligation to obtain factual information
about the economic situation of their clients, in practice, compelled
charity agents to give attention to wages, conditions of work and
unemployment, no less than to intemperance, improvidence, and
shiftlessness. Knowledge of the misfortunes of hundreds of different
families gained through experience as friendly visitors induced many
representatives of the organized charities to regard the industrial
causes of poverty as more important than the personal. x

The emphasis of systematic charity on self-support and its
prejudice against almsgiving as a remedy for the ills of the poor
further disposed its practitioners to a sympathetic attitude toward

The Rise of Social Work 57

labor. Charity agents' work brought them into frequent contact with
suffering imposed by the subordination of labor to capital in industry;
it made them acutely aware of the practical hardships that flowed
from treating labor as a commodity in the service of private profit.
From the beginning the aim of the charity organization movement
had been, not to expand, but to restrict, the charitable impulse.
Increasingly the agents of organized charity came to look upon the
attainment of social justice as a more important field of endeavor
than the administration of private benevolence.36

Neighbors of the Poor

In 1891 the rector of Holy Trinity Church in New York City
publicly scoffed at the idea "that the Church must reach the masses,
purify politics, elevate the laboring classes."37 His view probably
coincided with that of a great many other Protestant clergymen of
the day, but there was a rising tide of dissent. W. S. Rainsford,
himself the rector of the church at which J. P. Morgan worshiped,
condemned the tendency of organized Protestantism to seek "com-
fort and ease in the society of the rich." He charged that as a result
of indifference to the urban working class the Protestant churches
had lost the initiative in the years between 1830 and 1890.38

Rainsford and other progressive clergymen sought to regain the
initiative by restoring evangelical work among the poor to a more
prominent place in the program of Protestant congregations. There
had been an increase in home missionary activity ever since the third
decade of the century, but much of this work had been directed
toward spreading the gospel into sparsely settled areas of the West
and toward stimulating religious observance among the middle
classes.39 By the eighties and nineties concern over the growth of
Roman Catholicism, worry about the antagonism between capital
and labor, and the example of the Salvation Army convinced Protes-
tant groups all over the country of the need for intensified missionary
labor in the roaring wilderness of American cities.

Interest in the evangelization of slum dwellers in Boston and

America Awakens to Poverty 58

New York led to the establishment of missions in those cities at an
earlier date than in other parts of the country.40 To some extent the
nationwide concern with the sinfulness of New York City and the
eagerness of outsiders to promote missionary work there may have
diverted church groups in smaller cities from recognizing oppor-
tunities for similar work at home. In Paul Leicester Ford's The
Honorable Peter Stirling (1894), the hero's mother thought that
there were no serious social problems in the mill town where she
lived because there were seats enough in church for all comers; in
New York City, however, she understood that existing churches
could accommodate only one fourth of the population, and saloons
outnumbered churches ten to one. Her information came to her by
way of a missionary who was soliciting contributions in small-town
churches for the building of more religious edifices in the metropolis.41

By 1880 there were at least thirty undenominational societies
supporting missions in the slums of different cities. In addition to
their strictly religious activities the missions often attempted to
alleviate the material condition of the poor by engaging in limited
relief work. Some of them built model tenements and lodginghouses,
provided facilities for training children in the trades and domestic
occupations, equipped libraries and reading rooms, and promoted
country vacations for boys and girls from the slums.42 The best-
known and most successful of the missions was the Five Points
House of Industry in New York. Most students credit the regenera-
tion of the vicious Five Points district to the civilizing and educational
influence of this institution and its founder, Rev. Lewis M. Pease.43

The Broome Street Tabernacle in New York City organized a
mission society in the 1880's to conduct gospel meetings for inhabit-
ants of the cheap lodginghouses that lined the Bowery. Alexander
Irvine, a former British marine, was employed as a missionary by
this society for several years around 1890. He made his home in
just such a bunkhouse as Stephen Crane described in "An Experiment
in Misery"; it functioned as a combination soup kitchen, employment
agency, and old-clothes depot.44 Every afternoon Irvine toured the
neighborhood, conversing with destitute and homeless men, discov-
ering in the process that "there was one gospel they were looking
for and willing to accept— it was the gospel of work." Irvine's close
association with outcast men acquainted him with a rich variety of
human personalities. Where outsiders saw the Bowery bums only as

The Rise of Social Work 59

objects of scorn or ridicule, Irvine, the missionary, took them seri-
ously, listened to them with sympathy, and sought to understand
the causes of their failure in life.45

The institutional church movement, which made considerable
headway in the 1880's and 1890's, was closely related to city mission
work. Some of the churches engaging in community service, such as
the Broome Street Tabernacle, were erected through the efforts of
mission and tract societies; others found it necessary, as a result of
population shifts, to adopt welfare functions that had not been needed
when the church membership was largely composed of persons in
comfortable circumstances.46 As defined by Josiah Strong, the institu-
tional church was simply one that did whatever was most needed in
the locality where it was placed. This usually meant expanding
church facilities to include a gymnasium, baths, library, and rooms
for clubs and classes.47

The pioneer of the institutional church movement was William
A. Muhlenberg, rector of the Church of the Holy Communion in
New York City, who organized various charitable enterprises,
including St. Luke's Hospital, in the 1840's and 1850's.48 Russell H.
Conwell was one of the best known of the later exponents of the
"teaching, healing, and preaching church." His Baptist Temple in
Philadelphia instituted a night school for working people in 1884
which burgeoned into Temple University, and founded Samaritan
Hospital with its auxiliary dispensaries and visiting-nurse services.49
St. George's Church, situated at the edge of a congested tenement
neighborhood in New York City, increased its membership more than
fifty times in the fifteen years between 1882 and 1897 through the
strenuous labor of its rector, W. S. Rainsford— even though Rains-
ford's liberalism (he permitted dancing in the parish hall) and his
emphasis on the humanitarian aspects of religion cost the church
some of its old communicants, including Captain Alfred Thayer
Mahan.50

Institutional church workers, like Y.M.C.A. officials, often
found it desirable to make either formal or informal surveys of
social conditions in the community. Before assuming the pastorate of
the Central Congregational Church in Topeka, Kansas, Charles M.
Sheldon, author of In His Steps, familiarized himself with the city
by living for brief periods with different economic and nationality
groups and studying labor problems as they affected the people of

America Awakens to Poverty 60

the town. In 1889 Graham Taylor, then a professor at Hartford
Theological Seminary, supervised his students in making an analysis
of the population of Hartford by nationality and church denomina-
tion and in taking a census of the "destructive forces," such as
saloons, and "preventive agencies," such as the Young Men's and
Young Women's Christian Associations operating in the city. On an
even broader scale the Federation of Churches and Christian Workers
in New York began, in the late nineties, to make sociological surveys
of various districts of the city. The Federation acted as a clearing-
house in making the knowledge it had accumulated on housing,
employment, and related information available to religious and
secular welfare organizations.51

The settlement, like the charity organization movement, was an
English innovation widely and rapidly copied in the United States.
In 1883 the London Congregational Union published The Bitter Cry
of Outcast London, a moving account of the condition of the poor
in East London and an appeal for funds to establish mission halls
in the district. The report began on this challenging note:

Whilst we have been building our churches, and solacing ourselves
with our religion, and dreaming that the millennium was coming, the
poor have been growing poorer, the wretched more miserable, and
the immoral more corrupt; the gulf has been daily widening which
separates the lowest classes of the community from our churches
and chapels, and from all decency and civilization.52

Among those stimulated to action by The Bitter Cry was Samuel A.
Barnett, vicar of St. Jude's, Whitechapel, a parish that the Bishop
of London acknowledged to be the worst in his diocese. In 1884
Barnett and his wife converted their rectory into a social center for
the people of the community. They named the center Toynbee Hall
in memory of Barnett's friend, Arnold Toynbee, a young Oxford
tutor who had tried, as far as his academic duties permitted, to live
like a workingman, and they invited university men to settle in the
Hall, participate in its educational and recreational programs, and
become, not occasional visitors to, but friends and neighbors of, the
poverty-stricken inhabitants of the surrounding area.

The first American settlement houses were founded in the late
1880's by men and women such as Stanton Coit and Jane Addams
who admired, and in some cases had observed at firsthand, the work

The Rise of Social Work 61

being conducted at Toynbee Hall. In their turn the Neighborhood
Guild (later known as the University Settlement), the College Settle-
ment in New York City, and Hull House in Chicago became the
models for numerous other settlements established in this country
during the nineties. The idea was taken up so enthusiastically that
within fifteen years after Coit had organized the Neighborhood
Guild in New York's East Side about one hundred settlement houses
were operating in American cities.

On the surface there was little that was radically new in the
settlement movement. Missions contributed the idea of lighthouses
in the slums to help the poor find their way to better lives; institu-
tional churches suggested the community-center program which the
settlements adopted; and charitable organizations promoted interest
in voluntary service as the noblest form of philanthropy. Even the
idea of "settling" in the slums was not entirely new. The occupation
of tenements by well-to-do landlords was frequently advocated and
occasionally practiced; and in some of the model tenements there
were resident directors such as Charles B. Stover, later an associate
of Coit at the Neighborhood Guild, who organized clubs and classes
for the tenants.53 The real novelty of the movement lay in the
buoyant spirit, the fresh outlook, and the new attitudes its leaders
introduced into philanthropic work.

From the start the settlement idea appealed to youth. The
pioneers in the field were all young people. They were born too late
for Brook Farm and, in most cases, a little too early for Greenwich
Village. For the most part they were children of middle- or upper-
class households, well born and well educated. Success in conven-
tional business or professional careers and the achievement of assured
social position offered less of a challenge to them than to the offspring
of less fortunately endowed families. Instead, they found the call to
altruistic service irresistible, and they gravitated toward poverty, a
condition foreign to their personal experience. Had they lived in a
different age or in a different country, religion, politics, or even
revolutionary intrigue might have been their metier. Some of them,
in fact, had once planned to become missionaries in remote corners
of the world and were only deflected from that aim by becoming
aware of the opportunities for service in neglected areas of their

own communities.54

Most nineteenth-century philanthropists urged the rich to engage

America Awakens to Poverty 62

in friendly visiting and other voluntary charitable activities in order
that the poor might be improved by coming into contact with
superior beings. Brace, for example, rejoiced that through the
volunteer teachers in the Children's Aid Society Industrial Schools
"the refinement, education, and Christian enthusiasm of the better
classes" were brought to bear on slum children.55 Settlement leaders,
on the other hand, emphasized the reciprocal advantages which they
thought resulted from the association of persons of different economic
and social levels. The aim of the University Settlement in New York
City, as stated in its constitution, was "to bring men and women of
education into closer relations with the laboring classes for their
mutual benefit."56 Graham Taylor intended the Chicago Commons
to be "a common center where representatives of the masses and
classes could meet and mingle as fellow men. . . ,"57 The settlement
pioneers were very anxious to provide the poor with facilities for
recreation, aesthetic enjoyment, and self -improvement; but they were
no less desirous of making their settlements serve as kinds of graduate
schools where young men and women from sheltered homes might
study life in the raw and become acquainted with, and learn from,
people and situations that they would not otherwise have known.

The twofold objective of the settlements gave rise to a good
deal of uncertainty about their exact function. The story was told
of a society matron who, lorgnette in hand, inspected one of the
college settlements from top to bottom. "Well!" she exclaimed, at
the conclusion of her visit, "I do think you young ladies down here
are doing a magnificent work— whatever it is/"58 Like many others
she could admire the courage displayed by young ladies who went
into voluntary exile in the slums, but it was difficult for her to grasp
the real purpose of their "magnificent work." In fact, the settlement's
mission was not to do any one thing, but to provide an atmosphere
in which ties of understanding and sympathy could be established
between people of very different backgrounds and material con-
ditions.
/ Ideally, the settlement house was not an institution, but a home,

a comfortable sociable annex to each drab tenement flat. "Its books
and pictures," wrote Graham Taylor, "the nursery and play space,
the lobby and the parlor, the music and flowers, the cheery fireplace
and lamp, the dancing floor and place of assembly, are an extension
of the all-too-scant home equipment of its neighbors."59

The Rise of Social Work 63

In the early days some of the settlement houses were scarcely
less meager in appointments than other homes in the area they served.
When Coit opened the Neighborhood Guild it was located in a
dilapidated tenement. The Guild's librarian later recalled that the
floors were uncarpeted, the windows curtainless, and the gas jets
without globes. A piano, some books, a few photographs of Rome,
and a Turkish hanging did something, but not much, to relieve the
bareness of the place.60 As late as 1895 the University Settlement was
housed in an ancient four-story building so rickety that the police
would not allow the settlement to hold dances in it or entertain
more than a few children at a time.61

Clubs were the heart of the settlement program. Originally some
of the houses were little more than meeting places for different
neighborhood organizations. At the Neighborhood Guild the prin-
cipal boys' club was called the O.I.F., the initials standing for Order,
Improvement, and Friendship; the girls gave their clubs more
romantic names: The Lady Belvedere, The Rosebud, The Lady
Aroma, and The Four Hundred Social.62 At the nearby College
Settlement members of the Hero Club listened to stories of the lives
of great men, and then discussed the reasons for their heroes' success
in life.63 Most settlements also encouraged the formation of social-
science or social-reform clubs for adults and of literary, gymnastic,
and singing societies.

Other features were added as the need for them became ap-
parent or in response to the interests of patrons and residents of
the house. Most settlements maintained playgrounds, kindergartens,
day nurseries, baths, and classes in music, art, and domestic science.
Some offered baby clinics, workrooms for the unemployed, penny
provident banks, and meeting rooms for labor unions. Henry Street
Settlement had its visiting nurses; the Commons housed a church;
and Hull House sheltered a branch of the public library and operated
a boardinghouse for working girls.

Miss Addams explained how it happened that the settlements
became involved in such a variety of services:

In Chicago ... we have a day nursery at Hull House. We would a
great deal rather have someone else establish the nursery, and use our
money for something else; but we have it because there are not
enough nurseries in that part of the city. We have a free kinder-
garten, because we cannot get enough of them in the public schools

America Awakens to Poverty 64

of our ward. We have a coffeehouse, from which we sell cheap
foods in winter at cost, not because that sort of thing is what the
settlement started out to do, but because we feel the pressure for it.
One of the residents goes every day to the court, and has the chil-
dren handed over to her probational care when they are first arrested
—not because we want to do that, but because we have no children's
court and no probation officer.64

In her opinion the settlement house should be a place for experi-
mentation. Instead of concentrating on one line of work it should
try out new ventures, demonstrate their worth or futility, and, if
possible, get the city to take over the task of running the worth-
while ones.65

The settlement workers' close and neighborly relations with the
poor enabled them to undertake detailed and realistic investigations of
various phases of the poverty problem. The typical settlement study
dealt with a specific question, such as the incomes and expenditures
of a certain nationality or occupational group in a given district;
often it had a homely, down-to-earth quality which contrasted
sharply with the more ambitious but also more abstract and doc-
trinaire analyses of social and economic issues prepared by bookish
academicians. Even for those not consciously engaged in research,
settlement life offered training in the social sciences; many of the
residents took on voluntary assignments— sanitary inspection of
tenement houses, for example— which made them thoroughly familiar
with conditions in the community. When outsiders, such as the
novelist in Brander Matthews' "In Search of Local Color," wanted
to explore the slums, they frequently called on settlement workers to
be their guides.66 "In those days," wrote Mary Simkhovitch of the
late nineties, "there were few 'surveys.' The people who really knew
the neighborhood best were the priests, the politicians, and the settle-
ment residents."67

Because settlement workers were so well acquainted with the
needs and problems of the people in their neighborhoods, they tended
to place greater emphasis upon social reform than upon individual
improvement. Without in the least disparaging self-help, they sought,
through their clubs, lectures, and forums to encourage cooperative
efforts toward community betterment. At their best the settlement
houses were centers of discussion and information as well as of
recreation. Their residents were particularly interested in securing

The Rise of Social Work 65

more public parks and playgrounds, better schools, more public-
health services, and improved tenement-house laws. Jacob Riis called
the settlement houses fulcrums for the lever of reform and testified
that whenever a good cause was proposed, the settlements contributed
"young enthusiasts to collect the facts" and urge them on reluctant
city officials.68

Not all the settlements were as successful as some in widening
the areas of understanding between persons of different backgrounds,
and not all were active in promoting reform projects. Some remained
unilateral philanthropies whose residents, as Malcolm Cowley has
suggested, seemed anxious to reach down and help the poor climb
not quite up to the level of their benefactors.69 Frederic Howe, a
serious-minded and somewhat self-conscious reformer, found his
experience in a Cleveland settlement house at the turn of the century
"anything but fruitful." He felt uncomfortable as a friendly visitor
in the tenements, ill equipped to lead boys' clubs, and awkward
when dancing with heavy-footed immigrant women; he was so op-
pressed by the miserableness of the district in which the settlement
was located that he could manifest little enthusiasm for its ineffective
ventures in reform.70

Jack London, who had gained his knowledge of poverty the
hard way, was even more contemptuous than Howe of "These
people who try to help!" London's dislike of settlement workers
reflected his hatred for the capitalist class:

As someone has said, they do everything for the poor except get off
their backs. The very money they dribble out in their child's schemes
has been wrung from the poor. They come from a race of successful
and predatory bipeds who stand between the worker and his wages,
and they try to tell the worker what he shall do with the pitiful
balance left to him.71

London was convinced that the settlements were a failure. "They
have worked faithfully," he acknowledged, "but beyond relieving
an infinitesimal fraction of misery and collecting a certain amount
of data which might otherwise have been more scientifically and
less expensively collected, they have achieved nothing."72

Perhaps the last word on the subject was spoken even before
the settlement movement, as such, originated. Matthew Hale Smith
wrote of the city missionaries in 1869: "Few are fitted to labor in

America Awakens to Poverty 66

such . . . work. Patience, a loving heart, and warm sympathy for
the distressed are essential."73 Men and women possessed of these
qualities— and the combination is a rare one— found settlement life
rewarding. "You know the poor, if you take the pains to know
them," said Jane Addams, "and you do not know the poor, if you
do not take the pains to know them."74 In contrast to the workers
attached to charitable societies, who ordinarily visited tenement
families only in time of trouble, settlement residents saw nearly all
sides of tenement life, the brave and joyful as well as the sordid.
"We knew not only poverty and crime," wrote Mary Simkhovitch,
"but also the intelligence and ability and charm of our neighbor."75
Through friendly contact with the poor, settlement workers
acquired, not just a knowledge, but an understanding of the daily
life and trials of the urban masses. The best of them identified their
own interests with the welfare of their neighbors. Where others
thought of the people of the slums as miserable wretches deserving
either pity or correction, settlement residents knew them as fellow
human beings— and insisted that they were as much entitled to
respect as any other members of the community. Numerous young
men and women who lived and worked in the settlements during
the 1890's carried this attitude with them into later careers in social
work, business, government service, or the arts. It was the most
important single contribution of the settlement movement; and it
was destined to exert a great influence on the course of both social
work and social reform in the twentieth century.

CHAPTER 5

The Condition of the Poor;
Late Nineteenth -Century
Social Investigations

The helpful result of our study should be to renew the search for
the preventive causes of degeneration, and to re-instill a consciousness
of the necessity of improving both character and conditions.

Amos G. Warner, American Charities.
A Study in Philanthropy and Economics.

THE information on urban social conditions gathered by settle-
ment residents, institutional churchmen, Y.M.C.A. secretaries,
and agents of charitable societies was usually obtained as an
incident to other activities. Surveys and monographs undertaken by
these groups influenced workers in the movements involved and
were sometimes consulted by students and teachers of sociology;
but as a general rule they were not intended for, or readily accessible
to, the general public. Such knowledge as the average citizen
possessed on the subject of poverty he acquired (if not by personal
experience) from popular journalistic treatments of the problem.

There was no lack of curiosity about the existence of slum
dwellers in the latter half of the nineteenth century, much of it
excited by the peculiar depravity which was assumed to characterize
that life. For a half century after 1842, when Charles Dickens startled
the country with his description of the coarse and bloated faces of
the inhabitants of the Five Points, a succession of books rolled off

America Awakens to Poverty 6S

the press purporting to expose the mysteries and miseries of metro-
politan life.1 Not infrequently these sensational works, some of them
written by authors of dime novels, appealed to prurience behind a
mask of outraged respectability, and nearly all of them capitalized
on public interest in the details of vice and crime. Yet even the most
lurid of these "inside stories" of sin in the big cities recognized that
"The deserving poor are a multitude . . ." and acknowledged that
"amid all this crime and pestilential influence there are found true
hearts beating under breasts of spotless purity. . . ."2

On a higher level, newspapers such as the New York Tribune
and the Daily Graphic and periodicals such as Frank Leslie's and
Harper's Weekly devoted considerable space to articles describing
life in the slums. Harper's Weekly was particularly interested- in the
tenement-house problem, and during the seventies and eighties it
ran several series of papers on Bottle Alley, Gotham Court, Rag-
pickers Court, and other picturesque but miserable districts in New
York City. The article on Bottle Alley told of the enterprising family
which occupied one small room in a rear tenement: the family
regularly took in from eight to twelve lodgers a night at five cents
a head, and also sold sour beer at two cents a pint or three cents a
quart.3 Of Ragpickers Court the Harper's correspondent wrote:
"The men who live in these wretched hovels pay from Hvg to six
dollars a month rent out of earnings that hardly ever exceed fifty
cents a day. The agent who lets the property lives in New Jersey.
The owner— well, if the name were mentioned it would surprise the
people of New York City."4

By far the most influential of the popular writers on slum life
was Jacob Riis. Through years of experience as a police reporter he
had acquired an unrivaled store of anecdotes about the people of
the tenements, and he made liberal use of these in his books and
articles. In a typical chapter Riis explained the problem of child
vagrancy by telling this story: The remains of Harry Quill, aged
fifteen, were discovered at the bottom of an air shaft in the tenement
where his parents lived; investigation disclosed that two months
earlier Harry, while drunk, had attacked another boy on the roof
of the building; in the struggle the youth pushed Harry into the air
shaft, but felt it best to say nothing about the occurrence; at the time
the body was discovered Harry's parents had not yet notified the
police that their son was missing.5

Social investigations 69

The best known of Riis's books was How the Other Half Lives
(1890), a reporter's sketchbook which had the good fortune to be
published in the same year as Ward McAllister's picture of the
pleasures of the idle rich, Society as I Found It, and General Booth's
In Darkest England, an exploration of the social depths in London.
Riis appealed not only to the sympathy but also to the self-interest
of his middle-class readers. The strength of his book lay less in the
novelty of his material— for by 1890 there had been at least a genera-
tion of intermittent discussion of the tenements and slums— than in
the journalistic skill that made his description of existing evils seem
so authentic and his plea for reform so compelling. He denied that
the poor lived in slums simply because they were lazy, immoral,
intemperate, and dirty, but, except in the cases of children and
virtuous women, he displayed little sympathy for the economic
underdog and voiced no protest against the arrangement of society
which consigned masses of men to mean lives. His was no cry for
social justice, but a call to the propertied classes to bestir themselves
lest the crime engendered in the slums and the diseases bred there
invade the comfortable quarters where ladies and gentlemen resided.

During the hard times of the nineties serious magazines such as
The Forum printed numerous essays on philanthropic experiments
and on improved methods of dealing with dependency. The Arena,
edited by B. O. Flower, was especially receptive to articles on social
problems. The first issue of the magazine carried a symposium on
the causes of the increase in poverty, in which one contributor
suggested that not poverty itself but consciousness of it was on the
rise.6 Helen Gardener's "Thrown in with the City's Dead," which
appeared in The Arena in 1890, was an excellent early example of
muckraking. "Suppose you chanced to be very poor and to die in
New York," the article began. "We are fond of saying that death
levels all distinctions. Let us see." There followed a harrowing
report on conditions on tiny Blackwell's Island, to which the city
of New York consigned its insane, its "medium term" prisoners, and
its pauper dead.7 Flower himself was the author of Civilization's
Inferno; or Studies in the Social Cellar (1893), in which he attempted
to do for Boston's slums what Riis had done for Manhattan's, and
also to plead more vigorously for social justice for the laboring classes.

A series of articles appearing in Scribner's Magazine in 1892 and
1893 under the general title "The Poor in Great Cities" was a pioneer

America Awakens to Poverty 70

effort to examine urban poverty in a broad frame of reference.
The introduction referred to the condition of the poor as "the
central subject of all social questions" and cited relief of suffering
and improvement in the standard of living of the masses as necessary
forerunners of all other reforms. "What we need to know," said the
editor, "is what is doing, here and elsewhere, in the general and
efficient activity that has been the growth of the last few years; and
especially, what are the facts with which our own efforts are to deal,
and how facts elsewhere compare with them."8 Articles in the series
examined the extent of misery and the preventive and ameliorative
activities under way in London, Paris, Naples, New York, Boston,
and Chicago. The contributors included Riis, who wrote on the
children of the poor, Robert A. Woods, a Boston settlement leader,
and William T. Elsing, a city missionary and pastor of a large
institutional church in New York City.

The popular books and articles mentioned above were impor-
tant primarily as indications of a mounting interest in social ques-
tions. The best of them admittedly grazed only the surface of the
problems examined. Based on personal observation or impressions,
they were often intensely, and intentionally, subjective in their
approach. As late as 1892 Washington Gladden protested that there
was little "definite and reliable" information on poverty in America
in print and complained that popular ignorance on the subject was
"profound and universal."9

One reason why there was such a paucity of systematic knowl-
edge about poverty in America was the widely shared assumption
that being poor was a self-inflicted mortification. This attitude had
the result of directing toward pauperism and crime most of the
sociological research undertaken in the United States prior to the
1890's. Robert L. Dugdale's The Jukes (1877), for example, ex-
pressed both the contemporary concern regarding the "dangerous
classes" and the proclivity to lump dependency in the same category
as criminality. The Secretary of the Prison Association of New York
introduced Dugdale's book with the observation that "out of the
same social soil from which spring the majority of the criminals
there also chiefly grow up the vagrants and paupers— the ignorant
and vicious and incapable."10 Even American Charities (1894) by
Amos Warner, which incorporated the most recent findings of

Social Investigations 71

European and American research, treated poverty, no matter what
the cause, as synonymous with "degeneration." To the nineteenth-
century American few crimes were more reprehensible than inability
to make a living.

Preoccupation with the moral and fiscal aspects of pauperism
(that is, dependence upon charity for support) long prevented
Americans from making serious studies of the causes and results of
poverty. The English investigator, Charles Booth, was perhaps more
influential than any other intellectual factor in bringing about a shift
in the emphasis of' social research in the United States. His painstak-
ing study of the Life and Labour of the People of London, which
began to appear in the late 1880's, was soon well known and highly
regarded in this country. To a very considerable extent Booth set
the pattern for later American sociological investigations.11 Like
many of his contemporaries he had a tendency to subject persons
in lowly economic circumstances to moralistic tests. Nevertheless,
the ultimate result of his analysis of London's population was to
direct attention away from moral considerations and toward eco-
nomic factors such as occupations and wages.

Booth had a passion for facts. He was dissatisfied with guesses
about the amount of poverty, with theorizing about its probable
causes, and with melodramatic descriptions of isolated instances of
misery. By means of school-board visitors and other voluntary and
official agencies he made a street-by-street canvass of various London
districts, obtaining data on the employment, earnings, and housing
of a sizable portion of the city's population. On the basis of what
he believed to be reliable and pertinent statistics collected in this
fashion, Booth estimated that about 30 per cent of the people of
London lived in poverty. This conclusion, and also his finding that
intemperance was an unimportant cause of poverty as compared to
illness and unemployment, awakened great interest in his work. In
the long run, however, the lesson of Booth's study was its demonstra-
tion that poverty was not an amorphous, intangible, pseudoreligious
problem, but a concrete situation capable of economic definition and
worthy of scientific scrutiny.

Notable advances were scored in the field of social statistics
during the last three decades of the nineteenth century. The Census
Bureau, state bureaus of labor statistics, congressional committees, the

America Awakens to Poverty 72

federal Commissioner of Labor, and the Department of Agriculture
compiled and published reports on a multitude of subjects ranging
from wages and prices to the incidence of divorce. As a result of the
data supplied by these agencies no less a student than Charles B.
Spahr asserted in 1896: "In the United States, despite the absence of
income-tax returns, we find perhaps the most complete and satisfac-
tory statistics in the world regarding the aggregate of the national
income."12 It is noteworthy, however, that when Spahr estimated
the distribution of income among various classes he relied heavily
on "common observation" and contended that "upon matters coming
within its field the common observation of common people is more
trustworthy than the statistical investigations of the most unpreju-
diced experts."13

At the close of the century there were in fact (as there long
remained) vast gaps in statistical information on some pressing
economic and social issues. For example, in 1891 when Richard T.
Ely attempted to ascertain the number of paupers in the United
States he discovered that neither the states nor the federal govern-
ment had accurate records showing the number of persons in public
institutions or receiving outdoor relief.14

Inadequacies in technique were only partly responsible for the
incomplete and unreliable statistical information available at the end
of the century. By 1900 only about half the states had established
labor bureaus and fewer than half had developed factory-inspection
systems. Whether state or federal, legislation creating fact-finding
agencies, to say nothing of regulatory bodies, was often so weak that
employers were under no compulsion to answer questionnaires or, if
they did reply, to submit accurate- data.15 Furthermore, the appro-
priations granted the bureaus were seldom sufficient to permit them
to do a thorough piece of work.16 Thus in 1892 Congress passed a
resolution calling on the Commissioner of Labor to conduct an
investigation into the slums of cities with populations of 200,000 or
over— and appropriated $20,000 for the task. The number of cities
in the category designated was sixteen, but the sum appropriated
was barely enough to enable the Commissioner's staff to look into
some of the slums in four cities.17 Another example of congressional
parsimony occurred in the mid-nineties when the Commissioner of
Labor was "authorized and directed" to make a full-dress survey of
the employment of women and children, subject to the provision

Social Investigations 73

that the investigation be carried out under the regular appropriation
of the office.18

Some of the state labor bureaus were weakened by patronage
appointments of dubious qualification. At least one was placed under
the supervision of a director who had been notoriously hostile to
the establishment of the agency. Not infrequently statistical findings
were shaped by political pressures. The Michigan labor bureau,
by selecting counties in which property ownership was much more
concentrated than in the state as a whole, was able to demonstrate
that "one two hundredth" of the population owned 60 per cent of
the real estate of Michigan. In 1893 the Senate Finance Committee,
by garbling the figures submitted to it by employers, managed to
show a nearly seventy-per-cent increase in wages between 1860 and
1891.19 Similarly, as his critics were quick to point out, Carroll D.
Wright's summaries of the investigations conducted by his office
(Department of Labor) were not always consistent with the observa-
tions and statistical data contained in the bodies of the reports. No
doubt thirty years of experience as a state and federal officeholder
had taught Wright the value of ambiguity in the discussion of contro-
versial issues.20

The incomplete and unsatisfactory character of late nineteenth-
century statistical inquiries into industrial issues is well illustrated by
conflicting estimates of the extent of unemployment. In 1878, when
some calculations placed the number of jobless in Massachusetts at as
high as 300,000, the director of the state bureau of labor statistics,
basing his figures on the returns of police officials and tax assessors,
asserted that the actual number was less than 30,000.21

Wright devoted his first annual report (1886) as United States
Commissioner of Labor to a study of industrial depressions in the
United States and Europe in the half century since 1837; and in 1895
a Massachusetts commission prepared a notable report on unemploy-
ment relief.22 In general, however, studies of unemployment long
suffered both from inadequate coverage and from a want of scientific
spirit. Many seem to have been undertaken less to ascertain the facts
than to assure a troubled people that the problem was not really
serious at all.

For all their shortcomings, the early reports of the state and
federal labor bureaus introduced a greater degree of objectivity into
discussions of social and economic questions. In a commentary on

America Awakens to Poverty 74

studies of unemployment made by various agencies in the eighties
and early nineties, the economist Davis R. Dewey listed ten factors
which he said were "generally recognized as contributary causes
making for nonemployment,,, not one of which referred to personal
defects in the jobless.23 E. W. Bemis used the statistics on wages and
unemployment compiled by the Ohio labor bureau in his inquiry
into the standard of living of miners in the Hocking Valley in the
mid-eighties. Bemis assigned the major responsibility for the high
incidence of unemployment in the region to management's policy of
keeping a surplus of labor on hand; and he showed that owing to low
wages and frequent layoffs the average yearly expenditure per person
in miners' families must have been less than the amount spent by the
state of Ohio for the maintenance of an inmate in its asylums or
prisons.24

Industrial accidents and occupational diseases were among the
problems conspicuously avoided by most state labor bureaus.25 Never-
theless, the Interstate Commerce Commission recorded and published
in its annual statistical summary the grisly total of employees killed
and injured on the nation's railroads. President Benjamin Harrison,
calling attention to this "cruel and largely needless sacrifice," declared
in 1889: "It is a reproach to our civilization that any class of Ameri-
can workmen should in the pursuit of a necessary and useful vocation
be subjected to a peril of life and limb as great as that of a soldier
in time of war."26 In each of his annual messages to Congress Harri-
son recommended the passage of legislation, finally adopted in 1893,
requiring gradual installation of air brakes and automatic couplers
on railway cars employed in interstate transportation.27 Meanwhile,
approximately half of the states had enacted laws of varying effective-
ness providing for the use of safety devices and appliances on rail-
ways within their jurisdictions.28

Much of the credit for arousing public interest in railway safety
belongs to a Baptist clergyman, Lorenzo S. Coffin. Beginning in his
native Iowa in the 1880's, he gathered such facts as were available
regarding work accidents on the railroads and launched a campaign
for the adoption of automatic couplers and air brakes. He inter-
viewed railroad executives in an attempt to awaken their consciences,
wrote articles, delivered lectures, and preached sermons on the need
for protecting brakemen and other railroaders. In one day Coffin is
reported to have mailed more than 2,000 letters to prominent citizens

Social Investigations 75

in different parts of the country explaining the pressing need for
remedial action.29

Case workers for charity organizations were among the first
persons, aside from the victims and their families, to recognize the
part played by industrial accidents in producing poverty. W. F.
Willoughby, who made a survey of workingmen's insurance in
Europe and America in the 1890's, observed that in no other field of
reform was the United States more backward than in legislation
regularizing compensation for work accidents.30 In 1890 only half-a-
dozen states required factory accidents to be reported, and only one,
Massachusetts, had an employers' liability law of any efficiency.31
By the middle of the decade one out of seven railroad workers was
protected against injury or death at work through insurance schemes
voluntarily established by their employers.32 For the great mass of
workers in transportation and industry, however, there was bitter
truth in an investigator's statement that in America human life was
ordinarily regarded as cheaper than the small cost of protecting it.33

The plight of workingwomen was a favorite subject of discus-
sion among mid-century reformers and feminists. A brief review of
the problem in 1844 by a Boston clergyman, R. C. Waterston, struck
a modern note by examining piece rates paid in garment shops and
calculating the impossible number of hours it would be necessary for
a hand sewer to work in order to support herself by making shirts
at six or seven cents each and pants at twenty-five cents a pair. The
author, whose remarks were addressed to the Society for the Preven-
tion of Pauperism, warned that "inadequate wages— both because
they are inadequate and because they discourage— have proved to
many a source of pauperism."34 Louisa May Alcott's Work, although
not published until 1873, described conditions in a number of dif-
ferent women's occupations in the 1850's. To a modern reader its,
tone is distressingly sentimental, but, in one passage at least, Miss
Alcott spoke with evident sincerity: the best reply to people who
advise young girls to go to work as servants or factory hands, she
said, was "Try it."35

After the Civil War both official agencies and private individuals
made rather frequent investigations of female labor. Wright's reports
from the Massachusetts Bureau of Labor Statistics were the first
trustworthy accounts of the status of women wage earners in

America Awakens to Poverty 76

American industry, and when he became United States Commis-
sioner of Labor he continued to explore the question. His Fourth
Annual Report (1889), covering more than 17,000 workingwomen
in twenty-two cities, offered valuable data on wages, standards of
living, and sanitary provisions in factories. The New York and other
state labor bureaus undertook similar studies in the eighties and nine-
ties.

Elizabeth Stuart Phelps obtained the framework for her novel
of industrial life, The Silent Partner (1871), from the reports of the
Massachusetts Bureau of Labor Statistics. Fifteen years later, and in
a more realistic spirit, Helen Campbell's Prisoners of Poverty (1887)
exposed the precarious and ill-rewarded labor of women in New
York's needle trades and department stores. Although the style was
emotional, Mrs. Campbell's book was marked by a very practical
concern with earnings, budgets, and health. She showed how declin-
ing piece rates unsettled standards of living, and she presented
numerous case records to reveal what it meant, in terms of household
economy, to try to exist on three dollars a week. In a later work she
described factory employment for women as valuable only as prepa-
ration "for the hospital, the workhouse, and the prison," since the
workers so often were "inoculated with trade diseases, mutilated by
trade appliances, and corrupted by trade associates."36

Where Miss Phelps, in The Silent Partner, had preached moral
reform to manufacturers Mrs. Campbell maintained that the pursuit
of "bargains" by well-to-do shoppers forced employers to depress
wages below the subsistence level. Her disclosure of the human cost
of bargain-counter finery was one of the factors that inspired the
formation of consumers' leagues in several cities during the 1890's.
These shoppers' organizations investigated wages and working con-
ditions in retail establishments and published white lists recommend-
ing patronage of those which met the standards of a fair house. The
national organization of the Consumers' League, as will be made
clear in a later chapter, was one of the most active forces in working
for improved factory legislation to protect women and children and
in providing the legal defense when the constitutionality of the
statutes was challenged in the courts.

Fairly numerous, but not necessarily effective, legal restrictions
on the employment of minors testify that the question of child labor

Social Investigations 77

was by no means ignored in the late nineteenth century.37 Yet on
no issue, with the possible exceptions of unemployment and industrial
accidents, was factual information more difficult to obtain. Prior to
1870 the federal census did not differentiate between child and adult
workers in its statistics on wage earners; thereafter the totals were
broken down so as to indicate the number over and under fifteen
years of age. These figures did not represent an actual count of
working children, since they did not include the large group that
was not technically employed but regularly "helped" parents in
sweatshops and mines.38 For obvious reasons state labor bureaus found
it almost impossible to get employers to submit accurate data on the
employment of young children in their establishments. Those statis-
tics that were available in 1890, however, indicated that the wage
earners under fifteen were increasing at a more rapid rate than the
adult workers.39

Popular attitudes toward child labor may be gauged by the
frequency and enthusiasm with which the heroes of magazine fiction
and dime novels assumed the economic burdens of manhood at a
tender age. Charles Morris, not so well known as Horatio Alger, but
equally devoted to the gospel of youthful endeavor, had one of his
model youths, Harry Handy, complain to his employer that he was
not worked hard enough.40 From time to time a novelist wrote of
working children with compassion; Elizabeth Oakes Smith described
a group of newsboys, some of them dozing, in the pit of the Bowery
Theater:

You look at them, so thin, so like little old men, sharp, eager, self-
reliant when awake, and then when sleep comes and muscles relax,
and the overtaxed nerve yields to inaction, they grow children again,
weary, suffering, hard-wrought children they look, and you gaze at
their emaciated forms, the angular shoulders peeping from the ragged
shirt, the hollow temple and thin nostril, with an indescribable pang.
You feel how pitiful is the childhood of the poor.41

For the most part, however, Americans took it for granted that poor
children had to work and assumed that, within reason, it was good
for them to do so.

The legislation on the subject enacted in about half the states
before 1896 was consistent with this view. Ordinarily the laws applied
only to manufacturing, excluded only very young children (under
ten in some states, twelve or fourteen in others) from employment,

America Awakens to Poverty 78

and permitted older ones to work ten hours a day. It was common
knowledge that statutory restrictions were frequently violated
through falsification of age. Compulsory-education laws designed to
keep minors out of factories and mines until they had gained at least
a common school education were, in most states, so loosely drawn
and laxly enforced that, according to one investigator, they were
"a farce."42

Charles Loring Brace, founder of the Children's Aid Society,
devoted one chapter of The Dangerous Classes of New York (1872)
to "Factory Children." Brace made one of the earliest surveys of
child labor when he inquired into the employment of the boys and
girls attending the Society's night-school classes.43 He was far from
a doctrinaire opponent of child labor. His society presented a bill to
the New York legislature in 1872 which would have authorized
factory labor of children over ten years of age for a maximum of
sixty hours a week. Nevertheless, Brace was one of the most impor-
tant figures in the post-Civil War era in the movement for better
education for working children. He feared that, unless more attention
were paid to their instruction, the child laborers would swell the
ranks of the dangerous classes upon reaching maturity.

Critics of child labor became more outspoken during the eighties
and the nineties. Clara Potter reported on the working conditions of
children in New York City for the Christian Union, giving special
attention to industrial accidents in which youthful workers were
maimed and crippled. Because of the legal fiction that they were
employed at their own risk, the children almost never received
damages for these injuries.44 Clare de Graffenried, who investigated
the employment of minors in a wide range of retail and manufac-
turing enterprises in 1889, blamed the large number of cases of
tuberculosis among working girls on premature work, unsanitary fac-
tory conditions, and poor nourishment.45 Willoughby, discussing the
social aspects of child labor, commented that public opinion would
be inflamed if any state subjected the children in its reformatories
and poorhouses to the kind of treatment which they received as a
matter of course, and without public outcry, in many factories.46

Both Miss de Graffenried and Willoughby argued that permit-
ting a young child to work usually meant dooming him to a lifetime
of drudgery and helpless incompetence. They believed that boys and
girls who went into the factories, mines, stores, and offices when they

Social Investigations 79

should have been at school wore out their energies in routine and
repetitive tasks without acquiring the skills that would later enable
them to earn decent wages. Child laborers consequently entered
maturity under such a heavy handicap of ignorance and physical
debility that many could never become self-supporting.47 Several
years earlier a writer in a metropolitan newspaper had arrived at a
somewhat similar conclusion regarding children employed in the
street trades. "It is a popular fallacy that bootblacks and newsboys
grow up to be major generals and millionaires," he observed. "The
majority of them, on the contrary, become porters and barkeepers."48

The best-informed student of child labor in the United States
during the 1890's was Florence Kelley, a resident of Hull House and
chief factory inspector of the state of Illinois. Mrs. Kelley collabo-
rated with Alzina P. Stevens on a chapter about wage-earning
children for Hull-House Maps and Papers. Their paper was a righting
document which asserted that "it is not where labor is scarce, but
where competition for work is keenest that the per cent of children
is largest in the total number of employed" and that "children are
found in greatest number where the conditions of labor are most
dangerous to life and health."49

In 1896 Mrs. Kelley told the National Conference of Charities
and Correction that three years of experience as a factory inspector
had convinced her that regulation of child labor was impossible; the
only way to end the evils connected with it was to prohibit entirely
the employment of children under sixteen.50 Like Helen Campbell,
who had urged that it was as necessary to rescue children from the
factories as from the slums, Mrs. Kelley denied that child labor was
either desirable or necessary.51 "Why have newsboys?" she asked.
"Why not let the unemployed men sell the papers and the newsboys
go to school, as our own children do?" She contended that if parents
could not provide children with maintenance and education, the
state should assume responsibility for their care and instruction. In
this paper, read before a meeting of professional philanthropists, Mrs.
Kelley recognized that manufacturers' associations, department stores,
and the telegraph company (then the largest employer of child labor
in the world) would oppose the abolition of child labor; she predicted,
however, that the fiercest opponents of such a reform would be the
self-righteous, tax-conscious philanthropists. Prophetically, in view of
the history of the proposed child-labor amendment in the 1920's,

America Awakens to Poverty 80

she forecast that the philosophy of self-help, appeals to the stern
puritan virtues, and the argument of economy would all be adduced
to justify the continuance of child labor.52

In the nineteenth century concern with poverty was usually
accompanied by hostility to liquor; conversely, concern with intem-
perance frequently, as in the instance of Robert Hartley, led to
interest in poverty. Not always, but in a number of cases (as, for
example, Frances Willard), antisaloon sentiment went hand in hand
with economic radicalism. To many persons "the liquor interests"
represented plutocracy in its most insolent and insidious guise.53
The temperance crusade also drew adherents from men and women
who regarded indulgence in drink as not necessarily a vice but an
expensive and dangerous pastime. "What a great amount of time,
and strength, and money might multitudes gain for self -improvement
by strict sobriety!" exclaimed Channing. "That cheap remedy, pure
water, would cure the chief evils in very many families of the
ignorant and poor."54

Throughout the century the idea was accepted that drink was
one of the most important causes, if not the sole cause, of poverty.
Those who held to this point of view could point to numerous
examples that seemed to prove their point. As the years went by,
however, students of poverty— as opposed to the general public-
assigned a less prominent role to alcohol as a factor in producing want.
In the 1 830*8 Joseph Tuckerman estimated that IS per cent of
American pauperism resulted from drink; in the 1890*8, on the other
hand, the charity organization societies' records consulted by Amos
Warner indicated that intemperance was the cause of distress in
only 5 to 22 per cent of the cases investigated by the agencies.55
By the closing decade of the century, as noted in a previous chapter,
there was a growing tendency to think intemperance as much a result
as a cause of poverty.56

The formation in 1893 of the Committee of Fifty for the
Investigation of the Liquor Problem marked the emergence of a
more detached and scientific attitude toward this particular social
issue than had been apparent in most earlier discussions of it. The
Committee was composed of college presidents, prominent clergy-
men, and well-known social scientists; its announced purpose was
"to secure a body of facts which may serve as a basis for intelligent

Social Investigations 81

public and private actions."57 In the ten years after its organization
the Committee published five books, one a summary of its work and
the others dealing with the physiological, legislative, ethical, and
economic aspects of the liquor question.

In gathering data for several of these volumes the Committee
utilized the services of charity agents, settlement residents, and
teachers and students of economics and sociology. The study of the
economic phase of the problem was based on special reports sub-
mitted by thirty-three charity organization societies for each "case"
handled over periods of from three to twelve months. These reports,
as analyzed by the Committee's staff, revealed a higher percentage
of want attributable to intemperance (25 per cent) than had been
shown in Warner's study of the regular case records.58 The signifi-
cance of this finding was undermined, however, by the growing
conviction among professional social workers that it was unrealistic
to attempt to pick out any single factor as solely responsible for
distress.

The inquiry entitled Substitutes for the Saloon (1901) contained
information furnished the Committee by a variety of correspondents
on different grades of drinking establishments in seventeen cities.
This report began with a frank recognition that the saloon performed
a necessary function in society: "Its hold on the community does not
wholly proceed from its satisfying the thirst for drink. It satisfies the
thirst for sociability."59 As the Committee saw it, the problem was
to devise other institutions capable of meeting the social needs of
working people as effectively as the saloon. Laying prejudice aside,
the staff of investigators sought to learn from the saloon by analyzing
its nonalcoholic appeal. Altogether it was a unique and enlightening
presentation which, if its message had been heeded, might have
brought a more realistic spirit into the temperance movement.
Present-day students can find in it a wealth of information, not only
on turn-of-the-century saloons, but also on the quantity and quality
of other recreational institutions then available to the public in
representative cities.60

In the latter part of the century the tenement problem awakened
much interest, partly because of the traditional regard for the home
as the bulwark of society, and partly because of the supposed connec-
tion between tenements and saloons. "Foul homes" and "intoxicating

America Awakens to Poverty 82

drink" were the twin causes of poverty, according to Robert Treat
Paine, head of the Associated Charities of Boston. He thought that
each led to the other and that improvement of the homes of the poor
was a necessary preliminary to the elimination of intemperance.61
E. R. L. Gould, a statistician in the federal labor bureau, expressed
similar views in The Housing of the Working People (1895). "Bad
housing is a terribly expensive thing to any community," he warned,
"for its cost is drunkenness, poverty, crime, and other forms of social
decline."62 The reporter and fiction writer, Julian Ralph, who was
not entirely sympathetic in his attitude toward tenement dwellers,
nevertheless remarked that frequent visits to the saloon must be
expected among people who lived in quarters too cramped to encour-
age use for any purposes save eating and sleeping.63 Riis pointed out
that because of scant water connections it was often easier to get beer
than water in the tenements. In his opinion "the scandalous scarcity
of water in the hot summer" was the one most important cause of
drunkenness among the poor.64

State and city boards of health were usually charged with the
administration of such tenement laws or ordinances as were adopted
prior to 1900.65 The reports of these agencies provide *"he most
authoritative descriptions of slum and tenement conditions during
the last third of the nineteenth century. Their findings, which were
rather widely publicized in magazines and newspapers of the period,
showed that one of the consequences of being poor was greater than
average susceptibility to illness and death. Seventy out of every one
hundred deaths in New York City befell residents of the tenement
houses; in some notorious rookeries, such as Gotham Court on Cherry
Street, the annual death rate was almost 20 per cent— seven times as
high as the average in the city as a whole.66 The mortality rates for
the children of the poor were even more shocking than those for
adults. A writer in The Christian Union cited two New York alleys
where the death rates showed that nearly three out of four infants
succumbed before reaching five years of age.67

Allusions to the depravity of slum dwellers persisted to the end
of the century; but, especially in the 1890's, this view was challenged
by numerous students. In The Housing of the Poor (1893) Marcus
T. Reynolds drew together material on the economic condition of
tenement dwellers from state labor bureaus, boards of health, tene-
ment commissions, and charity organization societies; the slum inves-

Charles Haag, "Organized Labor,"
1901. Charities and the Commons,
XV 11 (1906-7), 611.

Eugene Higgins, untitled painting, c.
1905. The Craftsman, XII (1907), 144.

John Sloan, "Roofs— Summer Night,"
1906. The Craftsman, XV (1908-9),
562.

left: Glenn O. Coleman, "The Shop
Girl At Home," c. 1909. The Crafts-
man, XV 11 (1909), 146.

right: Art Young, "Holy Trinity"
1908. John Nicholas Beffel, ed., Art
Young, His Life and Times (New
York, 1939), p. 280. (Reproduced by
permission.)

left: William Balfour Ker, "From
the Depths," 1905. John Ames Mit-
chell, The Silent War (New York,
1906).

Social Investigations 83

tigation conducted by the staff of the United States Commissioner
of Labor in 1894 contained almost 250 pages of statistics on earnings,
unemployment, and rents paid by residents of slums in four large
cities; and Gould's Housing of the Working People examined the
experience of European and American communities in providing
decent low-cost housing for wage earners through public or private
initiative. Factual investigations of this sort disclosed that the problem
of the slum and the tenement involved the housing of productive
elements, not just the dregs, of industrial society.

In itself this was hardly a startling discovery. Fifty years earlier
men such as Griscom, Hartley, and Channing had made the point
that the tenements were nothing less or more than the homes of the
urban working class. Yet the earlier reformers, no matter how sharply
they had criticized the bad, expensive, and unhealthful housing of
the poor, had usually asserted that the "fault or ignorance of the
sufferers" was chiefly responsible for the evils they decried; and they
had assumed that the remedy lay in "the elevation of the mind and
character of the laborer."68

This may have been a valid diagnosis of the situation in the
1840's. A half century later the problem had become much more
complex; its solution impinged on all the other issues— wages, work-
ing conditions, industrial accidents, health, and unemployment-
affecting the standard of living of the urban masses. Relatively
little positive action had as yet been taken to rectify the ills and
injustices to which tenement dwellers were exposed, but improve-
ment in housing was nevertheless seen to be dependent on economic
and legal rather than moral reform.

At the end of the nineteenth century Americans were still
ignorant as to the actual extent of poverty in their midst. Only
rough estimates based on limited data could be hazarded. Charity
organization records, the number of evictions, and pauper burials
occurring in a given period were all used as an index of want.
Projecting his conclusion from such data, Jacob Riis estimated in
1892 that from 20 to 30 per cent of New York's population lived
in penury.69 Charles B. Spahr's investigation of the distribution of
property and income, which indicated a narrower and narrower
concentration of wealth, also implied that the number of the poor
was disturbingly large.70

America Awakens to Poverty 84

Although only slight progress had been made in determining
the amount of poverty in America, much attention had been given
to its causes. The trend of informed opinion was away from the
individualistic interpretation of want, and the ground had been
prepared for an inductive approach to the problem. There was
growing acceptance of the view that no single explanation yet
advanced was in itself sufficient to stand the test of facts. Amos G.
Warner, a very influential figure in the development of social work
in the United States, noted in 1894 that in modern society, "where
the individual suffers not only from his own mistakes and defects,
but also from the mistakes and defects of a large number of other
people," we must expect the causes of destitution to be "indefinitely
numerous and complicated."71

The opinion that was becoming current among social scientists
here and abroad was that poverty could not be studied as a separate
phenomenon, isolated from other economic and social maladjustments.
Rather, as a Canadian student suggested, poverty must be scrutinized
as "a part of the study of the economic life of the people as a
whole."72 This conviction brought with it an eagerness to discover
"what life is and how it is now lived by the people."73 E. B. Andrews
criticized both laissez-faire and socialist theoreticians for being "in
too great haste to generalize." The business of the present, he advised,
was "the analysis of social conditions— deep, patient, and undog-
matic."74

It was not merely disinterested curiosity that led the publicists
of the eighties and nineties to tear aside the veil of ignorance and
indifference that concealed the suffering of the poor from public
view. Men and women such as Riis, Flower, Helen Campbell, and
Florence Kelley were propagandists who hoped to alter conditions
by rousing the conscience of the nation. Like the muckrakers who
followed them they sincerely believed that once the "plain bald
statement of facts" had been submitted to the public judgment,
nothing could stand in the way of reform.

Perhaps they erred on the side of optimism. Realism in social
science was no better received by the polite classes than its counter-
part in literature and art. The powerful alignment of groups with
a stake in the perpetuation of social wrongs did not disintegrate
when its malefactions were exposed. But it was placed on the defen-
sive. In a liberal democracy it is literally true that the first step toward

Social Investigations 85

the achievement of reform is the exploration of and diffusion of
knowledge about the realities of the prevailing situation. By the
latter part of the 1890's a start had been made toward the accumula-
tion of social facts; after the turn of the century the study of man-
kind was to be carried forward with a vigor and zest that imparted
a characteristic tone to the intellectual climate of the Progressive era.

CHAPTER 6

The Discovery of Poverty
in Literature

There is a greater army,

That besets us round with strife,
A starving, numberless army,

At all the gates of life.

The poverty-stricken millions

Who challenge our wine and bread,
And impeach us all as traitors

Both the living and the dead.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, "The Challenge" (1873).

There is more true romance in a New York tenement than there
ever was in a baron's tower— braver battles, truer loves, nobler sacri-
fices. Romance is all about us, but we must have eyes for it.

Paul Leicester Ford, The Honorable Peter Stirling.

SOMETHING as old and omnipresent as poverty can hardly be
said to have been discovered by writers at any particular time.
It is just one of the elements the storyteller weaves into his tale
along with birth and love and war and death. But the emphasis and
approach to want vary with the writer, the social environment in
which he lives, and the audience to whom his production is directed.
Thus, in countless romances, old and new, poverty figures as the
difference in economic status creating a temporary barrier to the
mating of otherwise marriageable couples. It is the shadow from
which heroes and heroines emerge by hook or crook or chance to
lives of opulence and power. Scenes of humble life are frequently

Discovery of Poverty in Literature 87

introduced into stories of the rich and wellborn for comic relief,
homely philosophy, tragic contrast, or social protest. Here, however,
we are concerned with depictions of poverty as a permanent, chronic
condition in which people live out their lives— noble, sordid, or some-
thing of both.

Such a presentation of poverty first appeared in American litera-
ture in noticeable quantity in the late 1840's. Earlier writers had
sometimes advertised their intention to record "the short and simple
annals of the poor" and had asserted that noble hearts might beat
under mean garments. In practice, however, few of them had de-
parted from the convention that the heroes and heroines of fiction
should come exclusively from the ranks of the upper classes. When
they did, it was the homely virtues of the common man, not the
sufferings of the uncommonly poor, that they described.

A possible explanation for the comparative neglect of the very
poor in our literature during the first part of the nineteenth century
is that the misery and destitution accompanying industrialization
and immigration did not become clearly apparent in this country
until about mid-century. There were, however, areas of pronounced
wretchedness in the larger cities at a much earlier date; and during
periods of depression severe hardship was common throughout the
nation. If American writers failed to reflect these matters, the reason
was not that poverty and hard times were unknown, but that authors
did not deem them worthy of notice in literature.1

This attitude was related to the fact that the creative writers,
to an equal or even greater degree than students of social conditions,
were believers in the philosophy of democratic individualism. Gen-
erally speaking, they were more interested in moral questions than
in economic issues. Mind and character struck them as infinitely more
important than material circumstances. "The man, not the condition,
imports," declared the youthful Emerson in 1832.2 Shortly after the
onset of the depression of 1837 he wrote that it was easy for the
"philosophic class" to be poor; the only real sufferers from poverty,
he implied, were those persons who, lacking the consolation of books,
conversation, and thought, depended on outward display to demon-
strate their inward merit.3 Ten years later the author of a novel about
the Lowell factory girls expressed Emerson's ideas in a slightly
vulgarized form. Virtue is the only basis for human distinction, said

America Awakens to Poverty 88

A. I. Cummings. Without nobility of character the millionaire is
poor; if possessed of those "gems of true value— the virtues," factory-
girls are rich as queens.4

The man who was most responsible for interesting American
writers in poverty was Charles Dickens. He proved that powerful
and popular works of art could be fashioned from the dross of human
experience, showed that adventure, pathos, comedy, and romance
abounded in the shabbiest walks of life, and disclosed the color and
variety of incident that could be discovered in such unlikely places
as "the haunts of hunger and disease," "foul and frowsy dens," and
"cold, wet, shelterless midnight streets."5 Dickens peopled his stories
with waifs, paupers, criminals, and followers of lowly and sometimes
disreputable occupations. For readers he opened a new and populous
world where exciting adventures befell people as familiar and peculiar
as one's next-door neighbors; for writers he uncovered a vein of rich
and readily accessible literary material.

Dickens' influence was not confined to questions of style, plot,
subject matter, and locale: he also introduced a strain of radical
humanitarianism into the literary treatment of low life. "He was
more truly democratic than any American who had yet written
fiction," observed William Dean Howells in My Literary Passions
(1895). Through all his work ran "the strong drift of a genuine
emotion, a sympathy, deep and sincere, with the poor, the lowly, the
unfortunate."6 Dickens combined pity for the underdog with a
hatred, bitter and outspoken, for all the brutal acts that degraded
the poor and for all the harsh theories that justified or excused their
mistreatment. He did his share of moralizing, but he was not content
to bid people living in want to cultivate their minds and improve
their character. Unlike the American romantics, Dickens <was inter-
ested in the material surroundings of the poor. He described them
minutely and demanded that they be bettered.7

In the hands of some of his American imitators, Dickens' feeling
for the lowly lost its sharp edge and degenerated into sentimentality.
Yet he communicated both to readers and writers certain critical
attitudes that did much to stimulate interest in reform. Dickens
poked fun at manufacturers who claimed they would be ruined if
required to send factory children to school or to protect workmen
against dangerous machinery. He ridiculed philanthropists so intent
on rescuing heathens in faraway corners of the world that they

Discovery of Poverty in literature 89

could not see the misery under their noses. He told temperance
advocates that the saloons would cease to be problems when
the poor received other and better escapes from hunger, filth, and
foul air. He reminded those indifferent to the neglect and mistreat-
ment of children that boys and girls robbed of their childhood would
not respond, as adults, to reason and persuasion; and he warned
society that every slum would visit retribution upon the community
that permitted breeding places of ignorance, vice, disease, and despair
to exist.

Partly in imitation of Dickens, partly because they regarded
the misery that was developing in the fast-growing cities as an unwel-
come phenomenon in American life, the writers who dealt with urban
poverty in the 1840's and 1850's emphasized the lurid and sensational
aspects of the subject. The short and simple annals of the poor were
first explored in cheap serialized thrillers such as George Lippard's
Quaker City (1844) and Ned Buntline's Mysteries and Miseries of
New York (1848). These were allegedly factual exposures of vice
and crime in the big cities. Frankly directed toward a popular reading
public, they were spiced with knowing descriptions of gambling dens
and brothels and larded with warnings of the temptations that lured
unsuspecting youths and maidens to moral and financial ruin.

Lippard, before he died in 1854 at the age of thirty-two, wrote a
dozen books, including historical romances and legends of the Revo-
lution as well as sketches of contemporary urban life. An enemy of
capitalism, he organized a secret society whose members pledged
themselves to work for the eradication of the social evils that pro-
duced crime and poverty. In one of his last books, which bore the
title New York: Its Upper Ten and Lower Million (1854), he con-
tended that "the true Word" enjoined "the establishment of the
kingdom of God, on earth, in the physical and intellectual welfare
of the greatest portion of mankind."8 Although Lippard's works
enjoyed wide popularity, they were not taken very seriously by
critics. Horace Greeley refused to review, or to read, one of his
novels, even though the author described it as "an earnest effort on
behalf of the poor." Greeley advised Lippard that he would render
the poor a greater service by raising potatoes "than by writing
novels from July to Eternity."9

Buntline, a flashy and disreputable figure whose real name was

America Awakens to Poverty 90

Edward Zane Carroll Judson, has been called "the patriarch of blood-
and-thunder romancers."10 In the course of a half century of sub-
literary activity extending from the 1830's to the 1880's he produced
more than two hundred action stories of the sea, the city streets, and
the Wild West. Mysteries and Miseries of New York appeared
shortly before the author was sentenced to a year in prison for his
part in the Astor Place riot and about twenty years before he dis-
covered and popularized Buffalo Bill. The plots of the several stories
comprising the narrative are less interesting today than the preface
and appendices of the book, in which Buntline contrasted social
conditions in New York City with those of a generation earlier,
surveyed the extent of destitution in the metropolis, and argued
for stricter law enforcement and curbs on immigration as remedies
for the evils he described.

Both Lippard's Quaker City and Buntline's Mysteries and
Miseries of New York were adapted for the stage soon after their
publication. It was in the theater, in fact, that the melodramatic
approach to poverty, especially the representation of slums as ad-
juncts of the criminal or near-criminal underworld, found its abiding
home. The vogue of the play dealing with the seamy side of metro-
politan life has been traced back as far as 1823, when Life in London
was first produced in New York City and Philadelphia. By the
1830's the locale had been shifted to the New World in such topical
skits as Life in Philadelphia (1833) and Life in New York (1834).11
Beginning in the late forties and continuing until after the Civil War
there was an epidemic of New York plays. Benjamin A. Baker's
A Glance at New York (1848), Dion Boucicault's The Poor of
New York (1857), and Augustin Daly's Under the Gas Light
(1867) were only the best known of a group of offerings that
included New York as It Is, Out of the Streets, and New York
Burglars; or Wedded by Moonlight. Baker's A Glance at New York
detailed the experiences of a greenhorn in the slums and criminal
districts of Gotham. The hero was Mose, a "fire b'hoy," the idol of
the democracy not only because of his brave calling, but also because
of his prowess in beating the criminal element at its own game.12

Most of these fugitive melodramas were concerned with the
surface excitement of crime and disaster, but the titles of several—
Life's Struggles in a Great City, The Upper Ten and the Lower
Twenty, and Democracy and Aristocracy, or Rich and Poor in New

Discovery of Poverty in Literature 91

York— suggest that both playwrights and playgoers sympathized
with the hard lot of the poor and deplored the sharp contrasts be-
tween wealth and poverty. The point should not be pressed too far,
however. Despite their titles, a number of the plays had to do, not
with the chronically poor, but with persons of means who were
suddenly, and usually briefly, reduced to want by deceit or misfor-
tune. In Boucicault's Poor of New York, for example, the hero was
a rich young man ruined by the panic of 1857. At one point in the
play all action stopped while he addressed the audience as follows:

The poor— whom do you call the poor? Do you know them? do
you see them? they are more frequently found under a black coat
than under a red shirt. The poor man is a clerk with a family, forced
to maintain a decent suit of clothes, paid for out of the hunger of his
children. The poor man is the artist who is obliged to pledge the
tools of his trade to buy medicine for his sick wife. The lawyer,
who, craving for employment, buttons up his thin paletot to hide his
shirtless breast. These needy wretches are poorer than the poor, for
they are obliged to conceal their poverty with the false mask of con-
tent. . . . These are the most miserable of the Poor of New York.13

In popular fiction, as in the drama, writers often found it
expedient to follow a middle course between low and high life.
They set their stories amid scenes of dire poverty and exposed their
characters to privation and humiliation; then, as the plots unfolded,
they revealed that the protagonists had somehow become separated
from wealthy parents or otherwise deprived of their rightful inherit-
ances. The heroes and heroines were really gentlemen and ladies,
but it required complicated and lengthy maneuverings to prove the
fact. Meanwhile, Oliver or Gertrude suffered— all the more exquisitely
because made of finer clay than the multitude. This formula
guaranteed both tears and a happy ending. Dickens used it, and so
did a host of his American followers.14

Heroes drawn from the ranks of the people, like Mose the fire-
man, were nevertheless elbowing their way on to the stage and into
the pages of novels. In The Newsboy (1854) Elizabeth Oakes Smith,
wife of the Yankee humorist Seba Smith, made no pretense that Bob,
the key figure of her story, was anything but a homeless orphan,
entirely on his own. She liked him for what he was, a self-reliant
boy, "all real . . . nature down to his heels."15 Her sympathy went
out to boys such as Bob, but they did not impress her, as they did

America Awakens to Poverty 92

Charles Loring Brace, as potential members of the dangerous classes.
To prove how far they were from being pauperized, she told of one
little fellow who, on being asked if his feet were not cold, replied:
"What in hell is that to you?"

At mid-century writers such as Mrs. Smith, who possessed
strong democratic inclinations, honestly admired the self-made man,
and they were much less critical of social and economic conditions
than their successors were to be a generation later. In Song of Myself
(1855) Whitman announced his identification with "what is com-
monest, cheapest, nearest, easiest"; judging by the long list of occupa-
tions and conditions of life out of which he said his song was woven,
however, Whitman associated himself most closely with the active
and prosperous doers and builders, the strong-muscled carpenters,
blacksmiths, drovers, and farmers. There was no hint of exploitation
in his description of a file of laborers carrying hods. Each man in
the line was apparently destined to rise into the ranks of skilled
tradesmen. When he wrote of the "Yankee girl . . . with her sewing
machine or in the factory or mill," it was her clean hair that attracted
his notice, not her hours or wages.

To the extent that it was expressed in the literature of the period,
social criticism emanated more often from spokesmen of the con-
servative classes than from champions of the common man. It was
Melville's Redburn, carefully identified as a "gentleman's son," who
asked himself, after viewing the slums of Liverpool: "What right
had any body in the wide world to smile and be glad when sights
like this were to be seen?"16 It was proslavery Southerners, such as
William J. Grayson, author of The Hireling and the Slave (1855),
who most frequently attacked the inhumanities of the factory system.
And it was James Russell Lowell, heir to the New England patrician
tradition, who, in "A Parable" (1848), raised the objection to the
materialistic tendencies of capitalism which nearly all later critics
would repeat.

Lowell's poem described Christ's return to earth. Although
greeted with honor and displays of wealth, the Saviour heard bitter
groans wherever He went.

And in church, and palace, and judgment-hall,
He marked great fissures that rent the wall,

Discovery of Poverty in Literature 93

And opened wider and yet more wide

As the living foundation heaved and sighed.

Accusingly, Jesus asked men:

"Have ye founded your thrones and altars, then,
On the bodies and souls of living men?
And think ye that building shall endure,
Which shelters the noble and crushes the poor?"

"The chief priests and rulers" denied any guilt. They had built as
their fathers built, and their only concerns were to hold the earth
forever the same and to keep His images "sovereign and sole"
throughout the land.

Then Christ sought out an artisan,
A low-browed, stunted, haggard man,
And a motherless girl whose fingers thin
Crushed from her faintly want and sin.

These set he in the midst of them,
And as they drew back their garment hem
For fear of defilement, "Lo, here," said he,
"The images ye have made of me."17

Forty-five years after its publication "A Parable" gave William
T. Stead the idea for // Christ Came to Chicago (1894). Still later it
was quoted with approval by Jack London in The People of the
Abyss (1903).18 Lowell's position, however, was quite different from
that of some of the admirers of his poem. He was moved less by
fellow feeling for the "low-browed, stunted" artisan than by con-
tempt for "the chief priests and rulers," the money worshipers whose
religion and law were profit. Not because he believed in the equality
of men, but because he recognized their inequality, Lowell thought
that the able and the strong were duty bound to conduct themselves
toward the less fortunate in a decent and responsible manner. The
rich and the powerful were false to their trust when they used their
superior strength to enslave and destroy. Wealth and authority were
corrupt unless employed positively and beneficently in the interests
of mankind.19

As industrialism waxed during and after the Civil War a fairly
numerous group of writers examined the effect of economic hardship
and industrial oppression on society. They exposed the horrors of
mill towns and called on the upper and middle classes to take the

America Awakens to Poverty 94

lead in remedying evils that threatened to produce social disintegra-
tion or provoke social upheaval. One of the earliest of this didactic
school was Rebecca Harding Davis, mother of the famous reporter.
In A Story of To-Day, serialized in The Atlantic Monthly in 1861
and 1862, she asked her readers to dig into the commonplace, vulgar
American life, look at the so-called dregs of society, and see if they
did not agree with her that this life had "a new and awful signifi-
cance.'J To a nation whose major attention was already fastening on
the battlefields of the Civil War she counseled: "Go down into this
common everyday drudgery and consider if there might not be in it
also a great warfare."20 What she saw was

the slow stream of human life creeping past, night and morning, to
the great mills. Masses of men, with dull, besotted faces bent to the
ground, sharpened here or there by pain or cunning; skin and muscle
and flesh begrimed with smoke and ashes; stooping all night over
boiling cauldrons of metal, laired by day in dens of drunkenness and
infamy; breathing from infancy to death an air saturated with fog
and grease and soot, vileness for soul and body.21

Mrs. Davis described a textile mill in which most of the operatives
and some of the office help were women. In those establishments, she
observed, women could perform any job except that of overseer—
they were "too hard with the hands for that." She was no less
critical of the men in the plant, describing the laborers on the load-
ing dock as "red faced and pale, whiskey-bloated and heavy-brained,
. . . with souls half asleep somewhere, and the destiny of a nation
in their grasp. . . ."22

Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, daughter of the president of Andover
Theological Seminary and author of several popular novels, usually
with a religious tinge, wrote at least one book and a well-known
short story dealing with labor problems. "The Tenth of January"
(1868) was a fictionized account of the collapse and burning of a
Lawrence textile mill in 1860— a disaster that cost the lives of nearly
ninety employees. The story opened quietly enough, but then the
author made this startling observation:

Of the twenty-five thousand souls who inhabit that city, ten thou-
sand are prisoners— prisoners of factories perhaps the most health-
fully, considerately and generously conducted of any in this country,
but factories just the same. Dust, whir, crash, clang; dizziness, peril,
exhaustion, discontent— that is what the word means taken at its best.

Discovery of Poverty in Literature 93

Of these ten thousand two-thirds are girls: voluntary captives, in-
deed; but what is the practical differ ence? It is an old story— that of
going to jail for want of bread.23

Her novel The Silent Partner (1871) presented a more detailed pic-
ture of working conditions in the mills. William Cullen Bryant, who
touched on some of the same problems in his long poem The Song
of the Sower (1871), suggested somewhat vaguely, and in allegorical
terms, that the solution lay in a more equitable distribution of the
world's goods. Miss Phelps, however, like most of the other writers
of the day, was of the opinion that the only cure for industrial ills
was an increase in benevolence and piety on the part of employers.24
In "The Symphony" (1875) Sidney Lanier exclaimed:

Look up the land, look down the land—
The poor, the poor, the poor, they stand
Wedged by the pressing of trade's hand
Against an inward opening door
That pressure tightens evermore. . . .

Lanier, who once likened the Civil War to a tournament, despised
industrialism as only a countryman, poet, musician, moralist, cavalier,
and Southern patriot, all rolled into one, could despise it. In some
respects his poem harked back to earlier Southern attacks on wage
slavery, but it anticipated Markham's "The Man with the Hoe" and
Vachel Lindsay's "The Leaden-Eyed" by many years in comparing
the plight of the poor to that of beasts:

"Each day, all day" (these poor folks say),
"In the same old year-long drear-long way,
We weave in the mills and heave in the kilns,
We sieve mine-meshes under the hills, . . .
The beasts, they hunger and eat and die;
And so do we, and the world's a sty."25

With the exception of Lanier, who wrote from an agrarian rather
than a proletarian point of view, few writers of the seventies and
early eighties expressed open hostility to capitalism. Although kindly
disposed to the poor, they identified themselves and their interests
with the well-to-do. They were frightened by the estrangement of
classes that was dividing society into hostile and unfeeling camps. The
lesson they sought to impart was the need for mutual understanding
and sympathy on the part of labor and capital or, as they would

America Awakens to Pooerty 96

have said, the rich and the poor, to knit together the dangerous rent
in the social fabric. Believing that the comfortable classes, although
currently the more powerful, were potentially the more vulnerable,
they felt it was incumbent upon the rich to acquaint themselves
with the discontent of the poor and to do what they could to
alleviate it.

This attitude was well expressed by George T. Dowling in
The Wreckers (1886), a novel that combined the elements of a
Sunday-school lesson and a detective story. The Dickensian plot
involved a lost child adopted, after her cup of sorrow had been filled
almost to the brim, by a good and very wealthy family. The story
did not end at this point, however. There were a bank robbery, a
murder, and a murder trial yet to come, and also sufficient discussion
of industrial issues to justify the book's subtitle, A Social Study.
Nevertheless, the author maintained that his theme was "the dignity
of the commonplace." After all, he said, Jesus was "only a poor
peasant." The wreckers referred to in the title were "the inten-
tionally vicious" (a wicked foreigner), "the systematically tyran-
nical" (a harsh employer), "the thoughtlessly frivolous" (an idle
society woman), and "those who lie to, frighten, and mistreat chil-
dren." The author's philosophy was stated by one character:

"That there's bad people among the rich I don't doubt, just as there
is among the poor. But it ain't riches or poverty that makes 'em bad;
it's the kind o' heart they've got inside of 'em."

"God help us all deal tenderly with one another while we may," he
concluded. "Soon we shall lie down together in the dust, and it will
all be over."26

In the mid-century melodramas the novelty of urban poverty
constituted its chief claim to dramatic interest. The slums appealed
to dramatists and audiences alike as fitting backdrops for crime and
violence. By a generation later the slum and its denizens had become
sufficiently well established to permit Edward Harrigan to write
and produce a long series of popular comedies based on the recog-
nizable types and situations of New York low life. A native New
Yorker and graduate of the variety halls, Harrigan delighted in the
color and variety of everyday life among the poorer classes of the
city. He amused theatergoers of the late seventies and eighties by

Discovery of Poverty in Literature 97

showing them the familiar rather than the sensational aspects of slum
life; his plots, he said, described occurrences that were "simple and
natural— just like what happens around us every day."27

Frankly acknowledging his interest in the box office, Harrigan
defended his preoccupation with the lower orders of society on both
economic and artistic grounds:

It may be that I have struck a new idea in confining my work to
the daily life of the common people. Why some other playwright
does not try the same experiment, I cannot say. Their trials and
troubles, hopes and fears, joys and sorrows are more varied and more
numerous than those of the Upper Ten. Whoever puts them on the
stage appeals to an audience of a million. . . . And human nature is
very much- the same the world over. It thins out and loses all
strength and flavor under the pressure of riches and luxury. It is most
virile and aggressive among those who know only poverty and
ignorance. It is also then the most humorous and odd.28

His plays— musical comedies really, with music by his father-in-law,
Dave Braham— were rowdy and rollicking sketches of political
rivalries, social climbing, antagonisms, and alliances among the
tenement population.

Harrigan did not ignore the discomforts under which his
characters lived. Like the people he wrote about, however, he made
the best of things as they were, whenever possible turning hardships
into a joke. One of his songs, "Mulberry Springs," began with the
observation that when the rich went to Saratoga, Long Branch, or
Newport the poor also repaired to summer resorts— the roofs and
fire escapes of tenements.

The heat is intense, and the crowd is

immense, all praying and whistling for wings,

To get up and fly to the clouds in the
sky, the boarders at Mulberry Springs.29

The chorus of "McNally's Row of Flats" ran:

Ireland and Italy, Jerusalem and Germany,
Chinamen and Nagurs, and a paradise for cats
Jumbled up together in snow or rainy weather,
They represent the tenants in McNally's row of flats.

One verse bluntly described the misery of the tenants:

Bags of rags and papers, tramps and other slapers,
Italian lazzaronies, with lots of other rats,

America Awakens to Poverty 98

Laying on the benches and dying there by inches
From the open ventilation in McNally's row of flats.30

But cheery hospitality was the rule in "Maggie Murphy's Home"
(1890):

Behind a grammar schoolhouse,

In a double tenement,
I live with my old mother,

And always pay the rent.
A bedroom and a parlor

Is all we call our own,
And you're welcome every evening

At Maggie Murphy's home.31

Irish- American, Negro, and German and Italian immigrant types
were Harrigan's stock in trade. In the old tradition of comedy he
sought to create typical representatives of a class or group, rather
than individual personalities. Within this limitation he strove to make
his characterizations authentic, not only in external details of costume
and make-up, but also in the more difficult matter of "vices and
virtues, habits and customs." As painstaking in setting his stage as
in limning his characters, Harrigan copied the barroom scene in the
Mulligan series from a saloon on Roosevelt Street and modeled the
dive in Waddy Googan after an establishment near the Bowery.
His aim, he asserted, was to make each of his plays "a series of photo-
graphs of life today in the empire city."32

Contemporary literary figures watched Harrigan's work with
keen interest. Brander Matthews, devoted student of the French
theater, proudly took the great Coquelin to see Harrigan in Waddy
Googan in 1888.33 Howells hailed his productions as part of "the
great tendency toward the faithful representation of life which is
now animating fiction"; and Hamlin Garland, writing in 1894,
looked on Harrigan as the precursor of a school of urban local
colorists who would describe city life closely and sympathetically,
but in a matter-of-fact spirit, without consciously striving for the
picturesque.34

The picturesque, however, was precisely the quality of Harri-
gan's subject matter that most appealed to many of his admirers;
and it was in search of the picturesque, the quaint, the droll, and the
oddly touching that writers of fiction began to explore the slums.
The first and most enthusiastic of literary slummers was H. C.

Discovery of Poverty in literature 99

Bunner, editor of Puck from 1878 to 1896. As early as 1878 he
penned a triolet about a pitcher of mignonette in a tenement window;
later, in "The Love Letters of Smith" (1890), he wrote with affec-
tionate humor of the silent and ungrammatical courtship of "the
little seamstress" who lived "in the story over the top story of the
great brick tenement house." From his office window Bunner watched
the daily routine of tenement dwellers, finding in their comings and
goings and brief diversions the material for a charming essay.35
He called himself "an ardent collector of slums" and thought Mul-
berry Bend "the most picturesque and interesting" one he had ever
seen. Color was its strong point, he decided, for every tint and hue
was represented in the clothes, foodstuffs, and candy displayed in
the stalls along the street. There were shades to set your teeth on
edge, "pure arsenical tones," greens that nature could not invent, and
a profusion of reds and yellows so bright that "you could warm your
hands" on them.36

In his discussion of the urban local color movement Garland
had declared: "The novel of the slums must be written by one who
has played there as a child. ... It cannot be done from above nor
from the outside."37 In practice, few if any of the writers then
invading the slums in search of local color were native to the region.
Bunner had spent his boyhood in a moderately prosperous environ-
ment; his friend and colleague in putting New York on the literary
map, Brander Matthews, was the son of a millionaire, as much at
home in Paris or London as New York. Nevertheless, Matthews had
a genuine feeling for the city, and in "Before the Break of Day"
(1894) he offered a delightful vignette (his own word) of East Side
life. He could describe the locale expertly:

She lived in a little wooden house on the corner of the street hud-
dled in the shadow of two towering tenements. There are a few frail
buildings of this sort still left in that part of the city, half a mile east
of the Bowery and a mile south of Tompkins Square, where the
architecture is as irregular, as crowded, and as little cared for as the
population.38

The people, however, were beyond his ken. An author who might
have been Matthews himself figured in one of his sketches. This
man asked a settlement worker to escort him around the slums and
help him meet some poor people. "I can describe a first night at
the theater or a panic in the street," he explained, "but I've pretty

America Awakens to Poverty 100

nearly exhausted the people I know, and I thought I would come
down here and get introduced to a set I didn't know."39

Newspapermen, regardless of family background, had less reason
than Matthews' novelist to complain of lack of familiarity with the
people of the slums. Their assignments acquainted them with the
strange accidents and odd deaths that so often befell inhabitants of
the picturesque districts of the large cities. Reporting murders, fires,
accidents, fights, and trials was all part of the day's or night's work
for them. So, too, was attending political rallies, excursions, wed-
dings, wakes, funerals, and evictions. For many aspiring authors
journalism was an education in itself, not the least part of which
was the experience it afforded to write about actual people in real
situations. Yet in the nineties the newspapermen who wrote fiction
had little opportunity to use their professional experience. To be
more exact, they received little encouragement in the form of
acceptances if they wrote about the slums in a truthful vein. Business
is business, said magazine editors; stories are stories— fiction, not fact.

"Avoid offense" was the watchword of the quality magazines,
a policy that James L. Ford, onetime editor of the weekly Truth,
called "better for the counting room than for the making of good
literature."40 For a long time "Avoid offense" was almost synonymous
with "Reject low life." So scrupulously was this rule observed that
Ford once speculated whether Dickens could have sold Oliver Twist
to Century or S cri brier' s.41 "What a rush of literary boomers there
would be to this new Oklahoma should this old barrier be torn
down!" he exclaimed in 1894.42

Even as Ford wrote the rush was under way. The old barriers
of prejudice against low life in fiction had been, not torn down,
but breached at several points. The picturesqueness of the slums had
proved as irresistible to editors and readers as to writers. Heroes and
heroines were now permitted, even encouraged, to live in tenement
houses, but they were required to hide their poverty behind a sunny
smile and to avoid unnecessary references to it. Although the stories
might occasionally be sad, the shadow of adverse circumstances
must never be allowed to darken the glow of loving hearts. Low
life, in other words, was acceptable provided it was not presented
in a low or vulgar way. Whether happy or sad, the picture must
always be pretty.

"Good bad stuff" was Ford's name for the intentionally false
treatment of low life that found favor with editors and presumably

Discovery of Poverty in Literature 101

with the reading public. This species of fiction was usually written
in an arch style, and it nearly always adhered to certain conventions.
One of these was that the people in the tenements were not really
poor. The hero of Bunner's "Love Letters of Smith" received good
wages; he lived where he did because it was cheap and he was
saving money to return to Maine and buy an interest in a shipbuild-
ing business. The seventeen-year-old Elsa in Julian Ralph's "Love in
the Big Barracks" (1896) shared a four-room flat with six other
members of her family and a lodger, but this inconvenience received
less attention than Elsa's quaint superstitions and her touching love
for Yank.43 In another story of tenement folk Ralph reassured his
readers that

. . . they are not so poor as most of us think! Many are not poor at
all; many are poor only as they make themselves so. As a rule, each
family includes several wage-earners, worth to the common treasury
five dollars a week apiece. The rent of each flat is little; the cost of
food is less than most of us would believe possible, for these people
only eat to live. There is plenty of money for dress, cheap life insur-
ance, father-land societies, for charity to organ grinders and beggars,
for the church, funerals, festivals— and beer.44

If beggars appeared in the stories they were invariably frauds,
and the heroes dealt with them accordingly. The admirable Smith
in Bunner's tale collared two of them and kicked them "with deliber-
ate, ponderous, alternate kicks, until they writhed in ineffable agony."
This performance put color in the little seamstress' wan cheeks and
made her look very pretty.45 Richard Harding Davis' aristocratic
Van Bibber, who lived in style on inherited wealth, treated a pan-
handler with equal but more refined cruelty.46

In "good bad stuff" child laborers were bright-eyed, keen-
witted, and heroic. The newspaper office boy in Davis' "Gallegher"
(1891) worked until two o'clock every morning; he did not get
home until four and sometimes not at all. If he had ever attended
school the experience had left no mark on him.

He could not tell you who the Pilgrim Fathers were, nor could he
name the thirteen original States, but he knew all the officers of the
twenty-second police district by name, and he could distinguish the
clang of a fire engine's gong from that of a patrol-wagon or an
ambulance fully two blocks distant.47

All Gallegher knew he had learned on the street. This apparently

America Awakens to Poverty 102

included pickpocketing; for it was through this art, no less than
by his courage and endurance, that the boy was able to beat the town
with a sensational scoop. Where was Gallegher at the end of the
story? Sitting on the managing editor's lap with his head resting
comfortably on the older man's shoulder.

The popular delineations of low life frequently showed criminals
in a surprisingly sympathetic light. The authors' intention, of course,
was not to glorify crime but to prettify it. Human nature, rather
than criminal psychology, was what interested them, and they liked
to demonstrate that there was good in nearly everybody. In "The
Trailer for Room No. 8" Davis wrote of another child worker,
Snipes, a vagrant employed as a spy by a crook. Such was the honor
among thieves, Davis implied, that the brave little lad, out of loyalty
to the gang, rejected an offer of a good home with a kindly farm
family. Rags in Davis' "My Disreputable Friend, Mr. Raegan" might
have been Snipes grown up. This tough, having killed an old enemy,
escaped from the police and took refuge in a tenement house. He
was safe as long as he stayed there. But in the house he found an
abandoned baby. The baby was hungry and weak, growing weaker
every minute. The disreputable Raegan proved his essential goodness
by giving himself up to the police in order to save the baby's life.

It would have been strange indeed if the literature of a period
marked by industrial and agricultural depression, political ferment,
and serious labor unrest had been characterized only by romanticized
versions of poverty. Edward Bellamy and Howells, unlike some of
their colleagues who made lightheartedness a profession, did not seek
to minimize the ugliness and suffering caused by poverty. Rather
they sought, to the best of their abilities, to convey to readers their
own conviction that no issue was more important than the eradica-
tion of needless want. Had everyone been poor, poverty might not
have struck them as a serious matter; what distressed them was the
glaring contrast between luxury and misery, the seeming heedlessness
of the fortunate toward the unfortunate, and the utter hopelessness
of fundamental improvement under competitive conditions. Julian
West, the narrator of Bellamy's Looking Backward (1888), was
shocked by the differences in dress and circumstance of persons who
brushed against one another on the sidewalk in nineteenth-century
Boston. The teeming hovels of the slums lay so near the mansions
of the rich that West was surprised that the other guests at a fashion-

Discovery of Poverty in literature 103

able dinner party were not disturbed by the grievous voices of the
poor. The guests were used to the sound; it was the accompaniment
to their every banquet; they indicted their society by assuming
that the noise was natural.

In Howells' novel of the economic chance world, A Hazard
of New Fortunes (1890), Basil March and his wife were accosted
by a bum. Instead of kicking or making sport of him, as Smith or
Van Bibber would have done, March gave him a coin. When his
wife suggested that the man might have been an impostor, March
(and through him, Howells) replied:

Oh, I don't say he was an impostor. Perhaps he really was hungry;
but if he wasn't, what do you think of a civilization that makes the
opportunity for such a fraud? that gives us all such a bad conscience
for the need which is, that we weaken to the need which isn't? Sup-
pose that poor fellow wasn't personally founded on fact; neverthe-
less, he represented the truth. . . ,48

Mr. Homos, the enlightened visitor in A Traveller from Altruria
(1894), was another of Howells' spokesmen. He recalled stokers
in the depths of steamships who "fed the fires with their lives," of
mines that were the source of wealth and the graves of men, and of
so-called labor-saving machines that were really monsters wasting
men and devouring women and children.49 In a poem entitled "So-
ciety" (1895) Howells compared the social order to "a splendid
pageantry of beautiful women and lordly men" dancing and cavort-
ing on flowers that barely covered the bleeding faces and mangled
bodies of the poor.

And now and then from out the dreadful floor
An arm or brow was lifted from the rest,
As if to strike in madness, or implore
For mercy; and anon some suffering breast
Heaved from the mass and sank; and as before
The revellers above them thronged and prest.50

Here again was "the living foundation" of which Lowell had written
in "A Parable," supporting now, not thrones and altars, but a
dancing floor.

It was quite impossible for men afflicted with such troubled
social consciences to find anything picturesque in the cheerless life
of hard-working impoverished people. The Main-Travelled Roads
that Garland wrote about (1891) had "a dull little town at one end

America Awakens to Poverty 104

and a home of toil at the other." One of his characters who had been
fortunate enough to escape from this dreary environment felt his
heart sink when he revisited the scenes of his boyhood. The typical
farm home was "a grim and horrible shed," "a bare, blank, cold,
drab-colored shelter from the rain," and farm life itself seemed
chiefly characterized by "sordidness, dullness, triviality, and . . .
endless drudgeries."51

As for the local color of the city slums, it impressed these writers
as a dark and ugly hue. Ho wells admitted that at first glance a row
of tenements, decorated with the iron balconies of fire escapes and
festooned with lines of clothes fluttering like banners, might appear
to possess "a false air of gaiety." In a picture or from a distance it
might be very effective.

But to be in it, and not have the distance, is to inhale the stenches
of the neglected street, and to catch the yet fouler and dreadfuller
poverty-smell which breathes from the open doorways. It is to see
the children quarrelling in their games, and beating each other in the
face, and rolling each other in the gutter, like the little savage out-
laws they are. It is to see the work-worn look of mothers, the
squalor of the babes, the haggish ugliness of the old women, the
slovenly frowziness of the young girls.52

Certainly there was nothing quaint or humorous, nothing at all
exciting in Stephen Crane's description of a night spent in a seven-
cent lodginghouse on the Bowery. The mingled stenches of a hundred
men's breaths and bodies, their fitful tossing, and their coughs, snores,
and other night noises made the venture just what Crane called it,
"An Experiment in Misery." It had nothing to attract the reader—
except truthfulness to reality.

Those writers who admitted that poverty, whether urban or
rural, was in fact very offensive in aspect did not therefore reject it
as the stuff of literature. But they did reject the light touch, the
spurious felicity and optimism of the fabricators of popular fiction.
"Life's a failure for ninety-nine per cent of us," cried a farmer in one
of Garland's stories. Of an old woman in the same story Garland
wrote: "There was sorrow, resignation, and a sort of dumb despair
in her attitude."53 Charles Dudley Warner introduced a seamstress
into his problem novel, The Golden House (1894); this woman
lived in a tenement house, but she had no time to exchange love
notes with her neighbor. She was busy finishing pants at five cents a

Discovery of Poverty in Literature 105

pair from six in the morning until midnight.54 Edward W. Townsend,
who appreciated the lively colors of Mulberry Bend as much as
Bunner, sketched a very somber picture of nearby Baxter Street,
where the sweatshop workers lived:

The people, from the youngest to the oldest, were speechless and
grave and hopeless-looking. Men staggered past, their bodies bent
almost double under what seemed impossible loads of clothing they
were carrying to and from the sweaters' and the workshop-homes;
women carrying similar bundles on their heads, or perhaps a bundle
of wood from some builder's waste, not speaking to those they
passed; none of the children seen was much more than a baby in
years, and they were silent, too, and had no games: they were in the
street because while the sweaters' work went on there was no room
for them in their homes. In the dress of none was any bright color,
and the only sounds were the occasional cry of a hurt child, the
snarling of the low-browed men who solicited trade for the clothing
stores, quarrelling for the possession of a chance victim; and always,
as the grinding ocean surf mutters an accompaniment to all other
shore sounds— always, always, always!— was heard the whirring mon-
otone of the sewing-machine.55

On the copy of Maggie that he sent to a clergyman Crane wrote
that the book tried "to show that environment is a tremendous thing
in this world, and often shapes lives regardlessly."56 In the story,
however, Crane depicted Maggie as a victim rather than as a product
of her environment. The locale was Rum Alley, a far more sordid
slum than Baxter Street, not unlike some of the areas Jacob Riis
photographed in the late eighties, and strikingly similar to the Ash
Can Alley that Lincoln Steffens used in his brief and brutal sketch,
"Extermination" (1897). 57 There were no pitchers of mignonette
on the windowsills here— only empty bottles to throw at the cats.
The inhabitants, although not necessarily criminal, were mean and
vicious and scornful. They saved their pity and indulgence for them-
selves. In such a place and among such people weakness was an
invitation to attack. Had Maggie been hard and calculating she
might have adjusted to her surroundings as readily as her parents
and neighbors. But as far as we can tell from the rather thin charac-
terization of her provided by Crane, Maggie had defied all the rules
by growing up to be a decent, gentle girl. The very qualities that
might have brought her happiness in a different sphere were her
undoing in the neighborhood of Rum Alley and Devil's Row, for

America Awakens to Poverty 106

the slum would not tolerate such a deviation from the norm. Like
Lenny, the crazy boy in Steffens' "Extermination," Maggie was
unfit to survive in a bestial habitat; when the pack turned on her,
the river was her only escape.

If Maggie and Lenny were victims of their environment, the
neighbors who hounded and tormented them were the natural prod-
ucts of it. The behavior of the slum folk was not abnormal, but only
what was to be expected of the people at the bottom of the pile in a
brute struggle for existence and advantage. They were the debased
end product of an inefficient economy that gave no thought to human
needs, the logical results of a society that was as much and as profit-
lessly in love with gold as Trina in Frank Norris' McTeague (1899).
And they were not much more cruel or coarse than persons in more
fortunate circumstances; for nowhere, as things were (the writers
implied), was the social environment amenable to decent and
humane conduct. From bleak prairie farm to urban tenement the
story was the same: the whole people squeezed and twisted out of
shape by monstrous economic forces and suffering from a fearful
insecurity that made all selfish and unfeeling. We were making
wealth; but what kind of human beings were we producing in the
process?

Edwin Markham offered an answer to the question in "The Man
with the Hoe," an answer essentially the same as the one suggested
much earlier by Lowell, Lanier, and Rebecca Harding Davis. Mark-
ham's poem, however, was inspired by Millet's painting of a work-
sodden peasant, a universal rather than a national figure, and one
representing, so Markham thought, "the slow but awful degradation
of man through endless, hopeless, and joyless labor."58 As Markham
saw him, the Man was "a thing that grieves not and never hopes,"
"a brother to the ox"; his brow was slanted back, his jaw brutal.
There was "the emptiness of ages on his face"; all intelligence had
been extinguished in his brain; and he was "dead to rapture and
despair." He was a "dread shape," and the fact of his existence was
"a protest that is also prophecy."

O masters, lords and rulers in all lands,

Is this the handiwork you give to God,

This monstrous thing distorted and soul-quencht?

How will you ever straighten up this shape;

Touch it again with immortality;

Discovery of Poverty in Literature 107

Give back the upward looking and the light;
Rebuild in it the music and the dream;
Make right the immemorial infamies,
Perfidious wrongs, immedicable woes?

O masters, lords and rulers in all lands,
How will the future reckon with this Man?
How answer his brute question in that hour
When whirlwinds of rebellion shake all shores?
How will it be with kingdoms and with kings—
With those who shaped him to the thing he is—
When this dumb Terror shall rise to judge the world,
After the silence of the centuries?

First printed in the San Francisco Examiner in January, 1899,
the poem "flew eastward across the continent like a contagion."
Temporarily Markham's pathetic yet terrifying monster took preced-
ence over sporting events and crime in the daily press. It was the
subject of countless editorials and of innumerable letters to editors;
clergymen discussed it in their sermons; college students debated its
message, lecturers analyzed it, and William Jennings Bryan contrib-
uted an exegesis to a Hearst paper.59

"The Hoe-man," as the newspapers dubbed Markham's toiler,
smote the conscience of the nation. In Garland's words, the cry of
the age became "What shall I do to be just? . . . My heart is aflame
to be right."60 All through the next decade "The Man with the
Hoe" was to quicken the pulse of humanitarian reformers. It was one
of the literary influences that, together with the gradual accumulation
of sociological data on the condition of the poor, challenged the
complacent assumption that things were bound to work out all right
in the long run because human nature was the same at every level.
Human nature may be the same, said Garland, Markham, and other
writers and reformers, but conditions are not, and we must face the
fact that personality and citizenship may retrograde under the
pressure of extraordinary circumstances. We can put our trust in
long-suffering human nature, they said, only when we provide for it
a social environment conducive to the development of mankind's
nobler rather than its baser qualities.

CHAPTER 7

The Poverty Theme
in Art and Illustration

MERICAN subjects are well enough, but hard to find you
know— hard to find," remarked an impecunious young artist
in Stephen Crane's novel The Third Violet (1897). He
was pretending to be a fashionable painter showing off his wares
at a smart studio tea. Here was a pretty little thing, a peasant
woman in sabots; over there, a sketch of an Arab squatting in a
doorway; and next to it a delightful study of a gondolier leaning on
his oar. "Morocco, Venice, Brittany, Holland— all oblige with color,
you know— quaint form— all that," the impersonator continued. "We
are so hideously modern over here; and, besides, nobody has painted
us much. How the devil can I paint America when nobody has
done it before me?"1

This attitude was common among artists in the 1 890*8, but it
had not always been so, for there was a long tradition of interest in
the native scene in American art. Fifty years earlier painting America
had been a flourishing enterprise, and representations of the homely
incidents and occupations of everyday life rivaled portraits and land-
scapes in popularity. The painters of the 1840's and 1850's had
usually chosen to depict the pleasanter aspects of the American scene,
but they had not complained of a dearth of subjects, nor had they
scorned to record the characteristic experiences and emotions of
ordinary people. By the final decades of the century, however, both
the artists and the nation had changed. The painters who then
dominated the field had been trained in the best European schools.
Devoted to beauty, conscious and proud of the dignity of their high

108

Pooerty Theme in Art and Illustration 109

calling, interested in technique and in displays of virtuosity, they
found the average American environment distressingly ugly.

In fact, it very often was ugly. Water fronts that had been
picturesque in the days of sailing ships seemed prosaic in an era of
steam and steel. Cities, towns, and villages whose individual peculiari-
ties had once bestowed on them a kind of awkward charm were
giving way to raw industrial agglomerations differing from one
another, according to Lord Bryce, only in that some were built
more with brick than wood, others more with wood than brick.
Fanatical Greenbackers, hard-bitten Prohibitionists, and gaunt Popu-
lists lent themselves to caricature more readily than to the sympa-
thetic treatment painters of genre had given farmers forty years
earlier. The immigrants who worked in the steel plants were a far
cry from the village blacksmiths; their sisters in the box factories
did not look or behave like the young girls who answered the morn-
ing bell at a mill in one of Winslow Homer's early canvases. A
certain geniality had gone out of American life, or at least seemed to
be fast disappearing. It was hard for men whose business was con-
ceded to be the fabrication of things of beauty to find their inspiration
in the commonplaces of American experience.

If the artists were becoming more sophisticated, so were their
patrons. Ironically enough, as American life became progressively
uglier, public sensibilities became more refined. Year by year the
number of the wealthy, the cultured, and the educated increased
until gentility was so firmly enshrined as a national virtue that, as
someone said, to cause a blush was deemed more reprehensible than
to break a heart. There was no lack of interest in art. Museums,
home-study courses, libraries, and magazines assiduously spread the
gospel of good taste. Inevitably these institutions gave the impression
that art was what pleased the eye of the initiated. Of course it was
remote from everyday life, like literature and religion, an escape from
mundane affairs.

Toward the end of the nineties Henry B. Fuller observed that
American taste seemed to be composed of alternate layers of slush
and grit— sometimes one was exposed, sometimes the other.2 At the
moment, as for several decades before, the layer of slush was on top.
When not engaged in painting portraits of the fashionable or deco-
rating public buildings with allegorical murals, artists sought to
satisfy the demand for charm and beauty with idyllic landscapes

America Awakens to Poverty 110

and representations of mythological, historical, or literary events
and personages. The huge panoramas popular some years previously,
in which "one could see every spectacular feature for miles and at
the same time count every leaf," had been supplanted by smaller
and daintier scenes of gardens, graveyards, and bazaars,3 Pastoral
subjects, however, remained so much in vogue that one aspiring art
critic concluded that familiarity with the different breeds of livestock
was essential to success in the profession.4

Figure painting had come to mean a discreetly draped maiden
posed in a treetop ("Spring"), or firmly planted on a haystack
("Autumn").5 It was the era of "ideal heads," an art form greatly
admired by Trina in McTeague. Norris, a former art student,
described these as pictures of "lovely girls with flowing straw-
colored hair and immense upturned eyes." They were invariably
given names such as "Reverie," "An Idyll," or "Dreams of Love."6
Painters of genre had ceased to pretend that their works offered
truthful glimpses of actual life. Instead, they used their brushes and
paints to tell stories. The point of the anecdote was usually obvious,
but to make absolutely certain that no viewer was left in the dark,
the title explained what the picture said. Thus under a picture of a
little boy wearing oversize spectacles and pulling on an enormous
pipe, large black letters spelled out the message, 'Tm Grandpa."7

One of the most successful painters of the day was John George
Brown, a former prize fighter who was reputed to be William Jen-
nings Bryan's favorite artist. He had perfected a sure-fire formula
for his innumerable renderings of newsboys and bootblacks: ideally
pretty faces combined with photographically exact representations
of tools and clothes. "Sympathy," for example, showed a mongrel
dog comforting a pensive bootblack; the boy's brushes and polish
were spread out in front of his copper-toed shoes and the sagging
stockings on his sturdy legs sported a prominent hole.8 From the
sale of originals and reproductions of such "good bad stuff" Brown
derived an income of around $40,000 a year.

Oddly enough, the age of Brown was also the era of America's
most truthful and independent artists, Winslow Homer and Thomas
Eakins. Homer began his career as an illustrator, an occupation he
followed for nearly fifteen years after he began to paint. As a young
man he drew street scenes in Boston and New York for the pictorial

Poverty Theme in Art and Illustration 1 1 1

magazines, and in 1859 contributed a Christmas drawing to Harper's
Weekly in which he contrasted the celebration of the holiday season
on Fifth Avenue with its observance among the poor Irish squatters
of Shantytown.9 Later he drew a factory girl at her loom to illustrate
a passage in Bryant's The Song of the Sower. But neither the slum
nor the factory was his sphere; both as illustrator and painter Homer
preferred to depict rural or outdoor scenes and healthy, vigorous
people. The latter, whatever their other problems, do not give the
impression of being troubled by financial worries. Homer's distinc-
tion, as Henry James acutely but somewhat ruefully observed in
1875, was that he treated his homely American subjects "as if they
ivere pictorial, as if they were every inch as good as Capri or
Tangiers. . . ."10 Perhaps for that very reason it is significant that, as
he grew older, Homer apparently found less to please him, either as
a man or as an artist, in the American social scene. It had become too
urban, too artificial, too economic for his taste. He devoted himself
more and more to the study of the untamed forces of nature, espe-
cially the sea, gradually almost eliminating the human element from
his compositions.

With Eakins the human element was always dominant. His
subjects, however, except for professional oarsmen and pugilists, and
a few cowboys, were drawn from a rather narrow segment of
humanity. This was not the result of exclusiveness in taste or tempera-
ment, but because the everyday life of the middle class was the life
Eakins knew, and the materials were ready at hand. Subject, as such,
was relatively unimportant to him. He did not have to track down
the quaint and the picturesque in out-of-the-way places. There was
beauty enough, interest enough, in the real and the ordinary to
satisfy him. Eakins did not himself paint low life, but by his teaching
and example he helped break down the convention that only the
pretty and the pleasant were fit subjects for art.

Contemporary critics, although not universally hostile, custo-
marily expressed certain reservations about the work of Homer and
Eakins. Even a critic who praised Homer warmly remarked that
his pictures were "not wholly pleasing" and "not quite refined."
James admitted that one of Homer's canvases was "a very honest,
and vivid, and manly piece of work," but he went on to complain
that it was "damnably ugly."11 Eakins fared less well. The "Gross
Clinic," for example, was denounced as a "morbid exhibition" and

America Awakens to Poverty 112

as an example of "the horrible in art." Why it was painted in the
first place and why it was exhibited in the second mystified one
critic. Another remarked that to "sensitive and instinctively artistic
natures" the picture could not appear otherwise than as "a degrada-
tion of Art."12

There was one point, however, on which critics were inclined
to support Homer and Eakins. That was their preference for Ameri-
can subjects. W. Mackay Laffan baldly asserted in 1880 that there
was more to be admired in one "truthful and dirty tenement,"
"unaffected sugar refinery," or "vulgar but unostentatious coal
wharf" than in "ninety and nine mosques of St. Sophia, Golden
Horns, Normandy Cathedrals, and all the rest of the holy conven-
tionalities and orthodox bosh. . . ,"13 Few of his contemporaries
would have gone quite so far, but several chided American artists for
being so occupied with "Naples Sketches" and "Cairo Streets" that
they neglected the picturesque at home. E. W. Townsend, writing
in 1895, regretted that Mulberry Bend seemed destined to be trans-
formed into a park without having been painted by any American
artist. Should anyone condescend to paint "the Bend," said Town-
send, he might call the picture "Street Scenes in an Italian Town"—
and sell it.14

Neither Homer nor Eakins was addicted to "Naples Sketches,"
but, as already noted, neither was inclined to seek out the picturesque
in American slums and factory districts. Nevertheless, well before
Townsend called attention to the artistic potentialities of Mulberry
Bend a few artists had intermittently exploited the local color of the
tenement districts. Louis C. Tiffany, later famous as the discoverer
of a new formula for making decorative glass, and painter of pictures
bearing titles such as "Street Scene in Tangiers" and "Feeding the
Flamingoes," portrayed the ramshackle houses and sagging store
fronts of "Old New York" in 1878. At a water-color show in 1882
F. Hopkinson Smith, who subsequently achieved popularity with
sketches of romantic European cities, exhibited "Under the Towers,"
a view of the slums below the New York approach to Brooklyn
Bridge. "Forty-third Street West of Ninth Avenue" (1883), by
Louis Maurer, would have been branded "ash-can art" had it been
painted twenty-five years later, for the scene depicted was a bleak
city street with a man emptying a can of ashes into a refuse cart.15

In somewhat similar fashion painters who ordinarily selected

Poverty Theme in Art and Illustration 1 1 3

more conventional subjects occasionally turned their attention toward
working-class life. John F. Weir, a friend of Homer who became
director of the Yale School of Fine Arts, painted two exciting and
informative industrial studies in the late sixties, "The Gun Foundry"
and "Forging the Shaft." In 1879 Brown interrupted his profitable
production of street urchins long enough to make an interesting
picture of a group of longshoremen of different nationalities loafing
and exchanging stories during the noonday rest. Charles F. Ulrich
displayed a similar interest in immigrant types in "The Land of
Promise" (1885), a view of the crowded interior of the immigration
depot at Castle Garden; and in another painting he rendered the
details of the glass blower's trade with minute accuracy.16

The best of the industrial genre was "St eel workers, Noontime,"
painted about 1890 by Thomas P. Anshutz, a student and colleague
of Eakins, and himself the teacher of Robert Henri, John Sloan, and
William Glackens.17 The picture was as natural and forthright as
the scene it depicted: a group of men and boys, some washing, two
or three scuffling, but most of them just standing in the sunshine
outside of a huge mill. It had no story to tell, no humorous or exotic
types to portray, and no mysterious labors to describe. The scene
could have been duplicated outside any large plant in the country.
Or could it? For Anshutz somehow made it plain that each man
or boy in the picture was a distinct being, possessed of a history
and destiny all his own. It was a typical scene, but a unique one,
showing real people in a moment of their lives that would never
return.

Paintings such as those just mentioned were the exception rather
than the rule in the eighties and nineties. So, too, was the critic
Charles W. Larned's injunction that "in man's humanity lie the
noblest subjects of art." His advice, "Go out into the highways of
life, artists of today, and paint us the tragedies, the comedies, beauties,
hopes, aspirations, and fears that live; 'bring in the poor, and maimed,
and the halt, and the blind,' with the rest, and let us see the panorama
of life more before us," seemingly fell on deaf ears.18 Yet in one
branch of art, illustration, the daily panorama of life was being
recorded. It was the illustrator, much more than the painter, who
delineated the contemporary scene in a realistic manner. The reason
was plain. The painter's function, as most artists, critics, and laymen

America Awakens to Poverty 114

saw it, was to create objects of aesthetic loveliness. The illustrator's
job was more prosaic. He earned his bread and butter by representing
actual places, people, and events as faithfully and accurately as
possible.

Throughout most of the latter half of the century Harper's
Weekly was the illustrator's best market for topical drawings. Liberal
by the standards of its time, with a national audience and a wide
range of interests, the magazine balanced serious news pictures of
train wrecks and Mississippi floods with numerous scenes of humble
life. Yellowing in old issues are illustrations of a woman choosing a
hired girl from the immigrants at the Castle Garden labor exchange
in 1875; the catfish woman, the crabman, and other Philadelphia
street traders in 1876; and tramps sawing wood in a newly opened
Wayfarers Lodge in 1884.19 One of Harper's Weekly'' }s star per-
formers was a student of Eakins, A. B. Frost, who is best remembered
as the illustrator of Uncle Remus. Sometimes his contributions were
genre done in black and white. "Good Intentions," a typical example,
was a humorous but sympathetic drawing of a workman trying to
decide whether to stay on the wagon or yield to the temptation of a
hospitable saloon.20

Some of Frost's earlier work, along with the drawings of two
other prominent illustrators, W. A. Rogers and E. W. Kemble, ap-
peared in the Daily Graphic, published in New York in the seventies
and eighties. This was the first fully-illustrated daily newspaper in
the country and, like Harper's Weekly, it devoted almost as much
space to human interest as to news pictures. In an early issue the
paper carried an illustrated story on "The Private Life of the Gamin"
and a full page of drawings depicting "The Rag Pickers of New
York." Both were realistic and unsentimental in approach. The first
told of boys who spent the whole day on the streets, first selling the
morning papers, next shining shoes, and finally, in the late afternoon,
hawking the evening papers. In one of the ragpicker cuts women
rummaged through ash cans; in another an old woman and a dog
wrestled for a bone. American ragpickers, the text apologized, lacked
the romantic attributes of Parisian chiffoniers.21 Several weeks later
the Daily Graphic published Rogers' "Lunch-Time on the Wharf,"
a picture very similar in subject, at least, to the "Longshoremen's
Noon" Brown subsequently painted.22 The paper had the distinction
of being the first American newspaper to print a half-tone photo-

•f, " . » <<-00 tU

«■

Young pigs must have unbounded
freedom in direct sunlight and
pore air for healthy normal growth.
They must be induced to run and
Play at large range

Art Young, "Pigs and Children" c. 1910. (Reproduced by courtesy of The
Vanguard Press from Art Young, The Best of Art Young, copyright 1936,
by The Vanguard Press, Inc.)

Puck, 1909
A contemporary is publishing a series of pictures entitled "American Mothers." Don't forget this one at the right.

Art Young, "American Mothers," 1909. Bejjel, ed., Art Young, His Life and
Times, p. 259. (Reproduced by permission.)

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above: Lewis W. Mine, "Wash-Day in a Ho?nestead Court" c. 1908. Margaret F.
Byington, Homestead. The Households of a Mill Town (New York, 1910), facing
p. 141. below: Lewis W. Hine, "The North Carolina Legislature in 1913 Declared
That the Commercial Interest of the State Required Such as These in Cotton Mills,"
1913. The Child Labor Bulletin, // (May 1913), frontispiece.

Poverty Theme in Art and Illustration 1 1 5

engraving. Characteristically, for the Graphic, the photograph se-
lected to be thus reproduced was "A Scene in Shantytown."23

Despite the high quality of its art work the Daily Graphic was
never a commercial success. Most newspapers looked upon illustra-
tions as an expensive luxury, and few made any regular use of them
until the late eighties. Illustrations did not really become common
in newspapers until the nineties, when the spread of sensational
journalism and increasing competition forced publishers to adopt
pictures and other circulation-stimulating features. Then for a brief
period, until photoengraving processes were further perfected and
the photographer began to supplant the illustrator, newspaper artists
made drawings from photographs and sketched murder scenes, fires,
meetings, and sporting events. They were quick to respond to the
passing show of urban life; and sometimes, as in the case of John T.
McCutcheon, who illustrated George Ade's column in the Chicago
Record, they were regularly called upon to depict atmospheric
corners and queer characters of their cities.24

The slums and their inhabitants provided illustrators with an
inexhaustible fund of material, all the more so because the subject
could be approached from several different angles. Tenement scenes
were often depicted simply because they were "interesting." For
example, Charles Graham's "On the Roof of a Tenement House"
(1885) was introduced by the comment: "It is an interesting sight
to see a roof which covers a whole block and is two acres in extent
turned into the playground or the resting place of the hundreds of
men, women, and children who live under it."25 Sometimes, as in
Graham's "Sketches in the Fourth Ward," the interest was primarily
historical. Here the illustrator displayed Gotham Court, New York's
first great tenement building, a structure 30 feet wide and 300 long,
erected in 1850; on the same page he pictured a little house more
than two hundred years old that currently sheltered from fifteen to
twenty lodgers a night at ten cents a head.26 More frequently men
such as F. Barnard, who had illustrated an American edition of
Dickens' Bleak House, consciously sought out picturesque episodes
in the lives of the animated, oddly dressed inhabitants of ruinous
buildings.27

W. A. Rogers, although not indifferent to the odd and colorful
aspects of the tenement scene, inclined toward a more documentary
style. He sometimes accompanied Health Department physicians on

America Awakens to Poverty 1 16

their tours of inspection in the slums and sketched their activities.28
Likewise factual in approach was W. H. Drake, some of whose draw-
ings were used to illustrate the Annual Report of the New York
A.I.C.P. in 1884. Since one of the original aims of the Association
had been to promote friendly visits to the poor it is interesting to
note that the secretary now explained that Drake's pictures were
designed to show members "how and where the poor of New York
live" and thereby to "obviate the necessity of . . . personal exploration
of these unwholesome depths."29

There was enough unpleasantness in these pictures to satisfy the
most uncompromising realist, and the horrors they revealed were
confirmed in the photographs Riis used to document his case against
the slums. Not infrequently, however, the editorial comment that
accompanied the illustrations took the sting out of the drawings by
asserting that the chief responsibility for the conditions displayed lay
with the occupants of the tenements. They were drunken, improvi-
dent, and dirty, and they made their environment as bad as them-
selves. Dan Beard, a pioneer in radical cartooning as in the scouting
movement, took no chance that his attack on the Trinity Church
tenements would be misconstrued. At the top of his page a minister
mouthed platitudes against corruption; at the bottom the Grim
Reaper stalked through the church's dilapidated properties, cutting
down children and old people. Beard pictured Trinity as Janus-faced:
one side was a pious preacher, the other a grasping landlord.30

Low life made as strong an appeal to illustrators as to writers.
Early in his career Charles Dana Gibson, whose beautiful girls and
Van Bibberlike young men were to be idolized by a generation of
Americans, contributed to Life a series of drawings entitled "Salons
of New York." In these sketches Gibson obliquely satirized the
pretensions of the Four Hundred by portraying receptions and balls
in the humbler social circles of the metropolis. The best of the group
was the memorable "Evening with the Gentlemen's Sons' Chowder
Club," a drawing that might have been an illustration of a scene from
one of Harrigan's comedies. There was nothing colorful or cute,
however, about Charles H. Johnson's "What Is Going on When
the Clock Strikes Twelve" (1892). He drew a "sport" drinking with
his girl; a tenement woman, tired from a long day's labor, sent out
for beer by her no-good husband; and a prostitute approaching a
young man on the street.81

Poverty Theme in Art and Illustration 1 1 7

Perhaps the most realistic and certainly the most comprehensive
collection of drawings of low life was the set of illustrations E. W.
Kemble prepared in 1895 for Townsend's Daughter of the Tene-
ments. Kemble was best known as the illustrator of Huckleberry
Finn and as a delineator of Negro types. Here, however, he presented
a gallery of East Side scenes and types— sweatshop workers, fruit
peddlers, beer-hall entertainers, street urchins, and bums. They were
straightforward pictures, showing an appreciation of the distinctive
flavor of the region, but not seeking to make the place or the people
more colorful than they were in life.

Several illustrators made a specialty of depicting slum children.
Some of their characterizations seem to have been strongly influenced
by Brown. Dickens had described Jo, the crossing sweeper in Bleak
House, as "dirty, ugly, disagreeable to all the senses," covered with
sores and devoured by vermin, but Barnard presented him as a
handsome and pitiable little boy.32 Sol Eytinge reflected less of
Brown's and more of Dickens' spirit in drawings such as "The Hearth-
stone of the Poor" (1876), in which street children huddled over a
steam grating, and "A Tragic Story," wherein ragged newsboys and
bootblacks enacted a sad scene from a popular melodrama.33

M. A. Woolf's tenement kids were as characteristic of Life as
the Gibson Girl, and as many as three or four of his drawings of
the amusing and pathetic adventures of city children appeared in a
single issue. Woolf's affectionate portrayal of youth in the slums
mirrored the philanthropic attitude of John Ames Mitchell, the
editor of Life, who maintained a farm camp for underprivileged
children. The boys and girls he drew were frayed and undernour-
ished, often forlorn, but never downright wretched, and, although
mischievous, they were never presented as actually or potentially
vicious. They bore little resemblance either to Brace's dangerous
classes or to the little monsters that Crane and Steffens described in
their stories of slum life. On the contrary, they were appealing
youngsters, just as endlessly involved in affairs of the heart as their
older, healthier, and better-dressed cousins in Gibson's society draw-
ings.34

"Hogan's Alley," the most famous of the early comic strips,
also emphasized the genial side of tenement life. After Hearst lured
R. F. Outcault, the originator of the strip and the creator of the
Yellow Kid, to the New York Journal, George Luks drew "Hogan's

America Awakens to Poverty 1 1 8

Alley" for the World. Always exuberant, Luks attempted to outdo
Outcault by introducing the Yellow Twins into the cartoon. Both
Outcault and Luks had earlier contributed sketches of low life to
Truth, and both relished the earthy and physical kind of humor
that seemed more abundant among uninhibited poor people than in
refined and prosperous circles.35

The contrast between rich and poor, a theme that Eytinge
broached in several drawings, was strikingly illustrated by Thure
de Thulstrup in "Where Two Ends Meet" (1891). Earlier attempts
to state the problem in pictorial terms often gave the impression of
being contrived, but De Thulstrup's drawing revealed a scene from
life. The place was Bellevue Wharf in New York, a pier that served
both as a yacht landing and as the terminus of the ferries that ran to
the islands in the East River where the city's charitable and correc-
tional institutions were located. At one side of the pier stood a knot
of well-dressed and handsome people awaiting the arrival of the
rest of their yachting party. At the other side, and only a step or two
away, a file of dispirited men and women shuffled and hobbled to
the boat that was to carry them to the almshouse or the workhouse.
The idle rich and the idle poor were going for boat rides.36

De Thulstrup's drawing was perhaps not intended to convey
any specific message. It simply recorded a fact. But on the title page
of B. O. Flower's Civilization's Inferno (1893) an unidentified artist
used the contrast theme in a symbolic cross section of the social
structure. As he pictured it, society's top story was a luxurious room
in which the rich danced and made merry; at the street level work-
men crowded around a factory; in the basement widows and orphans,
representing the deserving poor, struggled to maintain life and self-
respect; and down below, in the cavernous subbasement, lighted only
by the faint rays of a policeman's lantern, lurked the desperate and
vicious classes.

Like other students of the contemporary scene, illustrators often
seemed more interested in existence in the social basement and sub-
basement than at the street level. Nevertheless, they did not entirely
ignore working-class problems in their drawings, and some of them
expressed strong sympathy for labor. Magazine and newspaper artists
depicted working conditions of miners, stokers, and stevedores as
well as turbulent episodes in strikes.37 As early as 1859 Harper's
Weekly published a cartoon criticizing the railroads for disregard of

Poverty Theme in Art and Illustration 1 1 9

their employees' safety, and in the seventies the Daily Graphic waged
a spirited pictorial campaign in behalf of a Saturday half holiday for
working girls.38

In these and other drawings illustrators and cartoonists, by
prodding the consciences of employers and of the middle class in
general, sought to induce them to treat deserving workers more
benevolently. Gradually, however, a more radical note entered the
cartoons. Walt McDougall introduced the conflict between preda-
tory wealth and involuntary poverty into the political arena in the
campaign of 1884. His "Royal Feast of Belshazzar Blaine and the
Money Kings" showed Blaine and his bedizened millionaire sup-
porters seated at a table laden with Monopoly Soup, Lobby Pudding,
Gould Pie, and Patronage Cake; in front of the table, but ignored
by the diners, stood a tattered workman pleading in vain for food for
his wife and child.39 By a decade later, according to a cartoon by
Beard, workmen were no longer content to beg for crumbs. Now
Labor was attacking Monopoly with the club of Trade-Union;
Monopoly, well protected by an armor made of Police, Sheriff, Mili-
tary and Vested Wrongs, struck back with the sword of Starvation
and the dagger of Pinkerton.40

Even though the validity of Beard's presentation of the problem
of industrial unrest might be challenged, no one disputed the right
of a cartoonist to deal with controversial topics. Nor did anyone
accuse De Thulstrup of impropriety when he drew even so unlovely
an incident as the meeting of the rich and poor at Bellevue Wharf.
Cartoonists and illustrators were expected to concern themselves with
such matters. Their business was life, not art. Not so with artists.
Beauty was their realm. Good taste circumscribed the subject matter
of their work; aesthetics demanded the observance of certain niceties
in its execution. Their products need not be beautiful or grand, but
they must be artistic, a delight to the eye and a consolation to the
spirit.

As the century drew to a close the reign of pretty falsification
seemed secure. Never had the output of ideal heads, allegorical
maidens, and nuzzling sheep been larger. Yet a revolution in subject
matter was shortly to burst upon the placid art world, and the first
stirrings of that revolution were already visible in the nineties. In
1891 a Chicagoan named Krausz issued a portfolio of photographs

America Awakens to Poverty 120

of street types— "Tough," "Ditch Digger," and "Iceman."41 Shortly
thereafter Alfred Stieglitz returned from a lengthy stay abroad and
began a series of painstaking camera studies of wet streets, horsecar
terminals, and railroad yards in New York.42 Meanwhile, Jerome
Myers was painting the people and buildings of the East Side, not as
an occasional diversion, but as a daily labor of love. George Luks's
fondness for low life was sufficiently well known in 1892 to attract
friendly satire in a cartoon called "The Glorification of the Tramp."43
In Philadelphia John Sloan, Everett Shinn, and William Glackens,
like Luks, were drawing for the newspapers and in off hours dis-
cussing the philosophy and practice of art with Robert Henri.

If American subjects were hard to find, these men did not
know it. What they bemoaned was not paucity of pictorial material
in modern America but the lack of interest in it manifested by artists.
This indifference, they thought, extended not only to native subjects,
but to all the real issues of life. It was the want of vitality and truth
much more than the lack of Americanism that they decried in the
artistic tendencies of the day. Their careers were only beginning
in the nineties, and neither their work nor their ideas received much
notice until after the turn of the century. Then, in a time of protest
and reform, they sought to prove that the province of art is as wide
as life.

Part Two

THE SEARCH
FOR TRUTH,

c. 1897-1917

8. The New View of Poverty

9. A Factual Generation

10. The Literary Record

11. Art for Life's Sake

CHAPTER 8

The New View of Poverty

... a vast army of the poor in this country are not in poverty
because they want to be, but because they have not been able to avoid
slipping down into the economic slough of despond. For the hard-
working father of a large family, who has been inadequately edu-
cated, or who has indeed entered the world but poorly equipped
physically to fight the battle of life, it is natural that an industrial
panic, that high rents, that dust-breathing trades, that industrial acci-
dents from unprotected machinery, that disease and other ills must
almost inevitably bring poverty. And when poverty comes in at the
door many of the customary virtues go out through the window . . .
Deception, falsehood, unreliability, intemperance follow naturally in
the wake of poverty.

"The Conquest of Poverty," Metropolitan Magazine,
October, 1909.

Jk LTHOUGH the Victorian era was marked by mounting
ZJa concern for the poor, few nineteenth-century students of
/ m social questions were really interested in poverty. Until
quite late in the century "the poor" was used to denote persons
receiving or in need of charity. Literary and political hacks heaped
praise on the "honest" or self-supporting poor, but social scientists
paid this group scant heed. In an age of laissez faire it was taken for
granted that dependency was the only phase of the poverty problem
that affected society, or with which society was competent to deal.
According to the prevailing view, a man's economic condition was
nobody's business but his own— until he "degenerated," ceased to be
independent, and became a charge on society. Throughout most of
the nineteenth century, therefore, pauperism rather than poverty
engaged the attention of students, and the energies of reformers
were directed less at the abolition of want than at devising methods
of relieving distress.

123

The Search for Truth 124

One of the peculiarities of late-nineteenth-century philanthropy-
was an intense dislike for charity on the part of those who dispensed
it. Scientific philanthropy began as a revolt against the old-fashioned
spendthrift almsgiving. Its supporters regarded chronic dependency
as a pernicious social disease; they operated on the theory that people
ought to be self-supporting and that those who were not must be led
or driven into taking care of themselves. They thought that charitable
assistance should be provided, not abundantly in a spirit of loving-
kindness, but reluctantly, and only as a matter of stern necessity.
Their object was to induce prosperous America to mobilize its
charitable resources for legitimate need instead of squandering that
precious reserve on casual benevolence. Above all, they insisted on
thorough investigation of each individual and family applying for
assistance. Verify the applicant's need for aid, ascertain the exact
circumstances of his case (ran their creed), and, on the basis of the
knowledge so acquired, help the recipient of charity find his way
back to the path of independence.

In the course of these painstaking investigations the men and
women who were the most active in scientific philanthropy uncov-
ered evidence of a host of poverty-producing factors that forced a
radical revision in the original assumptions of their work. By the end
of the 1890's agents of charity organization societies, settlement-
house residents, professors and students of political economy, and
supervisors of public-welfare institutions were all coming to believe
that pauperism was as much a result as a cause of social ills. Their
experience and research had convinced them that the evils attendant
on pauperism could not be brought within manageable limits until
the more fundamental problem of poverty, even, and especially
"honest" poverty, had been attacked. Social workers, as they were
beginning to call themselves, continued to regard efficient administra-
tion of relief as their particular responsibility; but to a much greater
extent than ever before they were aware of the need for identifying
and eradicating the destructive forces that bred the misery they daily,
and often vainly, sought to succor.

The new view of poverty, which became current around 1900,
was a product of the earlier interest in scientific philanthropy. The
new view departed from the old, not in any slackening of hostility
toward pauperism, but in defining the problem in terms of insuffi-

The New View 125

ciency and insecurity rather than exclusively as a matter of depen-
dency. Robert Hunter, a leading settlement worker and author of
one of the first estimates of the actual extent of poverty in the
United States, was as adamant in his attitude toward paupers as any
nineteenth-century poor-law reformer. Hunter contended, however,
that many families who were in no sense pauperized must be included
in any census of the poor. Only the most miserable of the needy are
destitute, said Hunter; much more numerous are the men and women
who, although self-supporting, are unable to secure the goods and
services essential to a state of physical efficiency. These are the real
poor of any community, he maintained, and their poverty consists
simply in receiving "too little of the common necessities to keep
themselves at their best. . . ,W1

This more inclusive definition of poverty won rapid acceptance
in the first two decades of the twentieth century, among both
practicing social workers and academic economists and sociologists.
A widely used college text published at the end of the period adopted v
inability to maintain a decent standard of living as the test of pov-
erty.2 Perhaps the most explicit and succinct statement of the modern
attitude appeared in 1914 in Jacob Hollander's Abolition of Poverty.
The author, a professor of political economy at Johns Hopkins
and an adviser to several Republican presidents, identified the poor
simply as the portion of the population that was "inadequately fed,
clad, and sheltered."3

Once want had been distinguished from dependency it was pos-
sible to extend the concept of poverty from present to prospective
need; that is, from insufficiency to insecurity. Hunter referred to the
poor as "the large class in any industrial nation who are on the verge
of distress," and Hollander likened poverty to a treacherous path
encircling the morass of pauperism. "Those who tread it," he said,
"are in constant danger, even with the exercise of care and foresight,
of falling or of slipping or of being crowded off."4 Is it surprising, he
continued, that people subsisting on miserable wages should be unable
to take precaution against mishap and calamity?6 Agents of charitable
societies who had formerly assumed that example and exhortation
were sufficient to lift paupers to economic independence now de-
spaired of rehabilitating clients whose lives were darkened by uncer-
tainty. A report on widows' pensions issued by the New York
A.I.C.P. in 1914 began with the significant declaration: "Until the

The Search for Truth 126

income needed for the maintenance of a fair standard of life is
assured, there can be no foundation upon which the visitor from the
relief organization, the nurse, the dietitian can work.6

Defining the issue in terms of insufficiency and insecurity brought
a changed attitude toward the supposed utility of poverty. In earlier
eras most Americans, while acting as if poverty were the worst fate
that could befall them, gave lip service to the doctrine that a dose
of adversity was good medicine for the individual as well as for
society. Throughout the greater part of the nineteenth century it
had been an article of faith with dime novelists, Sunday-school
teachers, and millionaires that poverty strengthened character, stim-
ulated incentive, and punished sloth. Andrew Carnegie, for one, had
written eloquently on the curse of wealth and the blessings of
poverty.7 The advantages accruing from severely straitened circum-
stances were less apparent, however, to twentieth-century students,
who saw poverty as "the supply source of pauperism" and who
believed that low incomes meant "insufficiency of food, lack of
clothing, and improper and unfit housing."8 To their way of thinking
poverty was neither desirable nor necessary, but unnatural and
intolerable.0

It was a sign that a new day had arrived when, in 1903, the
editor of Gunton's Magazine had the temerity to argue that Lincoln
was a great man in spite of, rather than because of, the economic
hardships he faced early in life.10 Three years later The Outlook
denounced "that curse of want which today condemns countless
children of the poor from their birth."11 Lester Ward's Applied
Sociology (1906) contained the flat assertion: "Indigence is an
effective bar to opportunity";12 and Edward T. Devine, the dean of
American social workers, observed that although temporary lack of
wealth might serve as a wholesome inducement to labor, chronic
poverty meant a low standard of living, overwork, overcrowding,
disease, and friendlessness.13

Walter Rauschenbusch, whose Christianity and the Social Crisis
(1907) was the most influential exposition of the social gospel,
emphasized the debilitating effects of want. His contention was that
"Constant underfeeding and frequent exhaustion make the physical
tissues flabby and the brain prone to depression and vacillation, '
incapable of holding tenaciously to a distant aim." Far from acting

The New View 127

as a moral tonic, said Rauschenbusch, "Poverty teaches men to live
from hand to mouth, and for the moment."14

Two monographs published by the Russell Sage Foundation in
1914 examined the influence of a miserable economic environment
on children. The Neglected Girl began on a somber note:

It [poverty] does not kill perhaps but it stunts. It does not come as
an overwhelming catastrophe; but steadily it saps the vigor of the
young as well as of the old. . . . With the less fortunate, poverty
takes the form of a slow, chronic contest against everlasting odds.15

The companion volume, Boyhood and Lawlessness, also made the
point that poverty destroyed the possibilities for normal development:
"The tenement child runs his race, but it is always a handicap."16

The view of poverty as a stultifying experience, debasing to
body, mind, and character, found its way into the species of popular
literature that had long sung of the bracing mental and moral
results of hard, ill-rewarded toil.17 In The Wisdom of the Simple,
Owen Kildare defied propriety by presenting honest poverty in an
unfavorable light. Wittle Street in lower New York, the locale of
the story, was no paupers' alley. Each house or flat had its bread-
winner. Every household was supplied with the indispensable mini-
mum of furniture, although in some instances the beds were
"surpassed in comfort and sanitary detail by the cots in ten-cent
lodginghouses peopled nightly by the scum of the city."18 Nor
were the Wittle Street folk lazy. They had "the confirmed habit of
working for every bite of bread and every drop of whiskey they
consumed."19 They had their hard, heartless independence— and pre-
cious little else. "It would have been better for them had they been
poor, abjectly poor and depending on charity," declared Kildare.20

By all the tests of civilized thought and behavior the working-
class families on Wittle Street lived in a primitive state. They were
quarrelsome, cruel, superstitious, and suspicious, and they demanded
conformity to their mean pattern. Kildare's explanation was that
years of struggle to obtain the bare essentials of existence had
smothered every aspiration for a better life and taught the people of
Wittle Street to be fiercely content with what they had. The stand-
ard of living available to them was simply incapable of supporting
more than a brute existence.

The Search for Truth 128

Yet even as Kildare prepared this indictment, another and more
reputable novelist argued that privation was by no means the worst
of being poor. Much deadlier, in William Dean Howells' opinion,
was the sense of insecurity that corroded the lives of both the idle
and the industrious. In A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890) Howells
had described and expressed the bafflement of the white-collar class
in the economic chance world. Shortly after the turn of the century
he contributed an editorial to Harper' }s Weekly in which he averred
that the curse of modern society was fear of want, a dreadful uncer-
tainty so exhausting to the spirit that want itself, when it finally
overtook its victims, was embraced almost with a feeling of deliver-
ance. With the barbed urbanity characteristic of his social criticism,
Howells commented that the United States was so abundantly
supplied with organized benevolences that destitution could easily be
confronted and overcome. "The community has amply the wealth
and will for that," he said. "It is the fear of want, the lurking fear,
the hidden fear, which cannot always be met, and which remains
through all the struggle of life to harass and hamper the victim."21

The shift in emphasis in studies of poverty from dependency
to insecurity and inadequate living standards reflected an improve-
ment in fundamental economic conditions. It had been pointless to
rail against want and uncertainty as long as man's incapacity and the
niggardliness of nature kept the supply of economic goods too
meager to meet the clamorous demand for them. Only satirists and
philosophers had then dared dream of a society in which there would
be sufficiency for all. Yet somewhere in the nineteenth century, or
even earlier, perhaps, the balance had begun to change. By the start
of the twentieth century, at least in fortunately endowed regions
of the world, industry and agriculture had advanced to a point where
there was at last a favorable relationship between human needs and
the possibility of satisfying them.

The dawning realization of this momentous change injected a
buoyant spirit into the study of economics. "Political Economy is
radiant with hope," wrote Henry George in the closing paragraphs
of Progress and Poverty.22 In England Seebohm Rowntree rejoiced
in the passing of "the dark shadow of Malthusian philosophy"; in
the United States Simon N. Patten hailed the emergence of an
economy of plenty as "a new basis of civilization."23 Walter Lipp-

The New View 129

mann lent his youthful voice to the happy chorus. Resignation may
have been an appropriate attitude for mankind to assume during the
long centuries when the world was poised uncertainly on the edge
of starvation, Lippmann wrote in 1914. "But in the midst of plenty
the imagination becomes ambitious, rebellion against misery is at last
justified, and dreams have a basis in fact."24

Even social workers succumbed to the infectious optimism of
the new century. "We are living in an age of economic surplus,"
boasted one of Robert Hartley's successors as general agent of the
New York A.I.C.P., "in an age when labor harnessed by science
produces more of the necessities of life than the race requires for
its bodily sustenance." There is wealth enough in the world to make
successful war on poverty, he exulted— wealth enough to abolish
brutalizing tenements, provide for the physical well-being of the
entire working population, and replace ignorance with enlighten-

ment.25

This conviction of abundance was the wellspring of the humani-
tarian movements of the Progressive era. To Walter Weyl the
"disequilibrium between social surplus and social misery" seemed at
once the irritant of popular unrest and the maker of uneasy social
consciences. "Our surplus has made us as sensitive to misery, pre-
ventable death, sickness, hunger, and deprivation as is a photographic
plate to light," Weyl wrote in The New Democracy (1912).26
Devine believed that "the sting of modern poverty in prosperous
communities is precisely that it is not necessary . . ."; and Hollander
was of a similar opinion: "It is because the whole loaf is large
enough to satisfy the hunger of all who must be fed that individual
want is intolerable."27 The views of these men appeared to be borne
out by the findings of the federal Commission on Industrial Rela-
tions, whose eleven-volume report was submitted to Congress in
1916. Basil M. Manly, director of research for the Commission,
reported that lengthy investigation had revealed no "natural reason"
why any able-bodied American workman should be unable to rear a
family of moderate size in comfort, health, and security.28

Advances in medical knowledge gave further impetus to the
tendency to view poverty as an abnormal manifestation. The latter
part of the nineteenth century saw several communicable diseases,
long accepted as unwelcome but unavoidable impositions on the
human family, arrested or wiped out entirely. A generation that had

The Search for Truth 130

seen typhus, typhoid, and smallpox brought under control, that was
eliminating yellow fever from large areas and was embarking on a
campaign against tuberculosis, was strongly disposed to regard the
scourge of poverty as similarly vulnerable.

Agents of charitable societies were well aware of the connec-
tion between sickness and dependency. They were heartened by the
belief that if preventable diseases were checked, the incidence of
poverty would decline. In view of the emphasis medical scientists
placed on unsanitary living conditions as a source of disease it was
only natural that social scientists came to regard poor environment
as their major problem.29 The new school of reformers thought of
poverty itself as a kind of malady, largely environmental in cause
and cure.30 They confidently referred to indigence as "a social disease
as surely curable as tuberculosis, typhoid and yellow fever"; and
they deemed "an epidemic of avoidable poverty" as disgraceful to
the community tolerating it as an epidemic of any other preventable
disease.31

This attitude contrasted sharply with the traditional religious
explanation of want as an affliction visited upon humanity by the
inscrutable will of God. For years Jesus' admonition "the poor always
ye have with you" had served as the text for innumerable sermons
and editorials designed either to encourage charity or discourage
social reform. In 1904 J. G. Phelps Stokes, brother-in-law of Robert
Hunter and himself the founder of the extremely successful Hartley
House settlement, challenged the customary interpretation of this
oft-repeated phrase. He suggested that Jesus' words might be re-
garded, not as a prophetic utterance, but simply as a description of
conditions prevailing at the time they were spoken. After all, said
Stokes (who had once aspired to be a missionary), "Jesus used the
present tense, not the future. . . ."32

The heart of the matter was that in the secular atmosphere of
the twentieth century, the idea that mankind was eternally and
inevitably caught in the toils of misery seemed unscientific. To a
confident and pragmatic generation such a view was part and parcel
of outworn and discredited postulates.33 A leading social worker
confessed that even in the hard times following the panic of 1907
he and his colleagues went about their work cheerfully, fired by
the conviction that poverty was "a relic of barbarism, man-made
and not God-made, unnecessary and preventable."34 The New View

The New View 131

was itself taking the form of a gospel. One of its clearest statements
was contained in an obscure book bearing the significant title,
Poverty; The Challenge to the Church, which began: "Poverty is
no longer an inevitable condition to be accepted and endured; it is
a problem of economic and social life which demands solution."35

To Americans there was little that was novel in the idea that
poverty was unnatural and unnecessary. For generations they had
boasted that in their uniquely favored land any man able and
willing to work was certain to achieve a fair living. The point of
divergence between the new view and the old was the different
explanation offered for the residue of misery that persisted despite
the favorable opportunities America freely extended to all comers.
During most of the nineteenth century the prevailing theory was
that if an individual failed to obtain a competence, the fault lay in
some weakness or defect in his own character. The experience of
the last quarter of the century, however, produced ample evidence
to bring this thesis into disrepute. By 1900 there was a widespread
conviction that the causes of failure were to be found, in most cases,
in circumstances outside and beyond the control of individual per-
sonality. Robert Hunter voiced the opinion of nearly all the reformers
of the Progressive generation when he declared that twentieth-
century poverty was due "to certain social evils which must be
remedied and certain social wrongs which must be put right."36

One of the most important of the numerous factors occasioning
this change of thought regarding the causes of poverty was a shift
in public attitudes toward wealth. The average American of the
Civil War generation deemed wealth the measure of virtue and
ability. His school readers no less than his elders' conversations indoc-
trinated him with the idea that affluence was both attainable and
admirable. When a rich man came to town he heard his parents say,
"He is rich," much as the ancients might have said, "He is a God."37
In an age of extraordinary economic opportunities it had seemed
axiomatic that if a man were rich it was because he possessed more
than ordinary intelligence and resolution. Men who, starting life
with no advantages other than their native resources, triumphed
over all obstacles to amass large fortunes were patriotic symbols.
"They illustrated with a peculiar glory the land of opportunity."38

After the 1890's conditions were less conducive than formerly

The Search for Truth 132

to adulation of wealth. Twice within the span of even a young
man's lifetime severe depressions had engulfed the nation. The growth
of monopoly and the closing of the frontier had seemingly curtailed
opportunities, not only for achieving immense wealth, but also for
establishing successful individual enterprises. In the decade and a half
before World War I the American economy appeared to manyi
observers to have reached maturity. The demand of the times was for
conservation rather than exploitation, distribution rather than accu-
mulation. The economic climate had undergone such a change that
success no longer seemed easily possible for all.39 Nothing was more
remote from the American consciousness than despair; nevertheless,
as the new century broke, a strong current of criticism began to
supplant the earlier complacent and unquestioning reverence for
material success.

Even in the heyday of the Gilded Age thoughtful men and
women had condemned the relentless intensity with which their
contemporaries pursued wealth, but a stigma of radicalism had often
been attached to their criticism. Under the altered circumstances
prevailing in the Progressive era it became more respectable and
popular to belabor "malefactors of great wealth." Where the earlier
critics had attacked materialism in general terms, their successors
were more specific in their charges. Muckrakers documented in-
stances of malpractices in business and finance and exposed concrete
examples of the use of economic power to corrupt politics on the
local, state, and national levels. In the past pulpit and press had often
denounced the ostentatious extravagance with which wealth was
dissipated in lavish entertainments; now writers as diverse in their
points of view as Gustavus Myers and William Allen White subjected
the methods by which riches were garnered to close and critical
scrutiny.40 Fortunes that had been admired for their very bigness
were presently shown to have been acquired in ways "that not only
grazed the prison gate but imposed burdens and disadvantages upon
the rest of the community."41 No man could "make" $20,000,000
in a whole series of lifetimes, said the poet and journalist, Ernest
Crosby; the foundation of such wealth, he maintained, was "not the
ability to create but the ability to annex."42

Clergymen of the social-gospel persuasion were particularly
troubled by the moral implications of huge fortunes obtained under
the conditions of competitive capitalism. Rauschenbusch spoke for

The New View m

the liberal wing of Protestantism when he objected that a social sys-
tem that lifted a small minority to great wealth and submerged vast
numbers in poverty was inimical to the interests of the church.43
More bluntly, the aging Washington Gladden lashed out at the
forces he called "predatory wealth." He touched off a controversy
within the religious community of the nation in 1905 by protesting
against the acceptance by the Congregational Board of Foreign
Missions of a gift of "tainted money" from John D. Rockefeller.
The gift was accepted despite Gladden's protest, and in his auto-
biography, published several years after the episode, Gladden con-
tinued the attack vigorously:

It is impossible to deny the existence of a considerable class of
persons who have obtained great wealth by predatory methods, by
evasion and defiance of the law, by the practice of vast extortions,
by getting unfair and generally unlawful advantages over their neigh-
bors, by secret agreements, and the manipulation of railway and
government officials; ... by manifold arts that tend to corrupt the
character and destroy the foundations of the social order.44

Gladden held that the duty of the churches and the universities
was to make practices of this kind "abhorrent and detestable" in the
eyes of youth, and he questioned their ability to do so if they
succumbed to the temptation of enriching themselves by taking
endowments from monopolists.

Growing concern with the sins of wealth induced a greater
willingness to apply a common standard of morality to all men,
regardless of their position in society. Progressive literature abounded
in exhortations to judge people by what they did and were rather
than by what they had or wore.45 Alfred Henry Lewis, author of
the Wolfville stories and an aggressive individualist in politics and
economics, was only applying this doctrine in reverse when he
asserted that he had found the poor to be "as thievish, as menda-
cious, as tyrannical within their narrower power ... as the rich."46
More typical of the Progressive emphasis was the concluding sen-
tence in a temperance tract issued by a charitable society in 1916:
"John Tenement Barleycorn and John Mansion Barleycorn differ
only in the houses they live in and the clothes they wear."47 Mary
E. Richmond, a decisive figure in the development of professional
standards in social work, advised her students that the classification
of humankind into workers and parasites was as appropriate for the

The Search for Truth 134

wealthy as for the needy.48 Rauschenbusch contended that luxury
was as responsible as penury for the production of degenerate types,
for both conditions fostered "the love of idleness, vagrant habits,
the dislike of self-restraint, and the inclination to indulge in passing

emotions."49

Once it was agreed that virtue and vice knew no class lines,
interest in the so-called moral causes of poverty began to decline.
Students of social conditions no longer deemed it profitable to exer-
cise themselves about the precise amount of distress properly attrib-
utable to various categories of undesirable behavior. "All these can
exist and do exist where there is no poverty," commented a labor
spokesman.50 Amos Warner's American Charities, published in the
early nineties, had devoted a full chapter to "Personal Causes of
Individual Degeneracy"; but Charles R. Henderson's Modern Meth-
ods of Charity, which appeared a decade after Warner's book,
dismissed the moral causes in one sentence: "The more individual
and personal causes of poverty ... are to be found not alone in any
one class of the community, but infect the whole social body,
deadening that spirit of devotion to social tasks by which alone men
become strong."51

The new school of reformers did not deny that individual
frailties contributed materially to want and insecurity, but they
insisted that social rather than individual weaknesses were the basic
causes of poverty. In existing circumstances, they said, character is
of only secondary importance in determining a man's economic
status. In the opinion of these students poverty was not so much a
mark of personal failure as an incident of society's imperfect methods
of producing and distributing goods. They believed that misery was
more often imposed on people by external forces than generated by
inadequacies within the sufferers. Consequently, in seeking to explain
the causes of distress they gave more and more attention to the
impersonal economic factors and less and less to the personal, moral
considerations.

In the economic interpretation of poverty unemployment, low
wages, and high living costs took the central place assigned to idle-
ness, improvidence, and intemperance in the moralistic view of the
problem. Basil Manly cited the findings of the Industrial Relations
Commission as evidence that lack of work and miserable pay had
reduced part of the nation's industrial population to a dangerously

The New View 135

low level.52 Louis Brandeis' brief in support of the Oregon minimum-
wage law contained a section headed "Underpayment the Root of
Poverty" and argued that underpaying industries were parasitic in
nature, subsidized by the employees, their families, and society as a
whole.53 In a study of the standard of living in certain working-class
households Robert Coit Chapin concluded that, regardless of personal
habits or ability to adhere to a budget, the economic well-being of a
family varied as the two jaws of the vise, wages and prices, contracted
and relaxed.54 Quite properly, however, it was an avowed socialist
who delivered the sharpest thrust against wage slavery. "People are
poor," said Scott Nearing in 1916, "because the rate of wages paid
by the industries of the United States will not permit them to be
anything but poor."55

Although "dying wages" and "famine for work" were the most
frequently cited of the economic causes of poverty, the list was
capable of almost indefinite expansion.56 Various students elaborated
it to include overwork, unhealthful and dangerous occupations, indus-
trial accident and disease, unsanitary dwellings and workshops, con-
gestion, child labor, and immigration.57 In 1910 Henry R. Seager of
Columbia University attempted to encompass many of these factors
in an arraignment of the "five great misfortunes"— illness, accident,
premature death, unemployment, and old age. He estimated that
each year a half million Americans were victimized by personally
unavoidable contingencies.58

The idea that poverty stemmed from economic forces over
which the individual had little control, and for the effects of which
he ought not to be held responsible, was not new. Yet never before
had it been so frequently advanced or so widely accepted as in the
first decade and a half of the twentieth centurv. It suited the secular
spirit of the Progressive era better than any other explanation of
want, and it was both a reflection of, and a stimulus to, contemporary
movements for social justice. Most significant of all, the increasing
emphasis placed on the economic (as opposed to the moral) causes
of poverty denoted that the historic interest in the condition of the
poor was giving way to a newly aroused concern with the rights
and grievances of the working class.

The new view of poverty affected opinion regarding the cure
no less than the cause of want. Individual reform, the traditional

The Search for Truth 136

remedy recommended to persons suffering from economic distress,
seemed ineffective to men and women who believed that "the mass
of the poor . . . are bred of miserable and unjust social conditions,
which punish the good and the pure, the faithful and industrious, the
slothful and the vicious, all alike."59 Many Americans agreed with
R. H. Tawney in his observation that unemployment, short time, and
low wages fell impartially upon the just and the unjust; and like the
brilliant English student the Americans were inclined to take an
irreverent attitude toward proposals to eliminate poverty by improv-
ing the morals of the poor. "Improve the character of individuals by
all means— if you feel competent to do so" (said Tawney) , "especially
of those whose excessive incomes expose them to peculiar tempta-
tions."60

The younger reformers deemed social reform a more urgent
task than the elevation of personal morality. They tended to be more
tolerant of personal derelictions than their predecessors had been,
because, in their opinion, poverty originated in adverse circumstances
too powerful for any individual to alter. On the other hand, confi-
dence that society could correct these adverse circumstances if it
chose to do so made them extremely critical of social failures or
inaction.

The target of their attack was "social maladjustment." Devine
declared that behind every form of degeneration and dependence
"there is apt to be some entrenched pecuniary interest which it is
desirable to discover and expose and with which it is the duty of
society to deal."61 Hollander claimed that "the misdirections, not the
normal workings" of twentieth-century industrialism left a portion
of the community in receipt of less than enough to maintain itself
in decency. "Now, in our own day," he asserted, "the conquest of
poverty looms up as an economic possibility, definitely within our
reach— if only society desire it sufficiently and will pay enough to
achieve it."62

Would society be willing to pay the price? Or would the effort
and the inconvenience involved, not to mention the material costs,
seem too onerous? The reformers' problem was to rouse the public
from its lethargy, make consciences uneasy, and stir genial good
will into enthusiasm for social betterment. Their first step was to lay
bare the responsibility of the community for needless suffering. With

The New View 137

a unanimity rare among their kind, the reformers emphasized the
same point: society, by callous inaction, countenances cruelties that
few men, as individuals, would perpetrate.

One of the best examples of the hortatory approach appeared in
1906 in an unsigned article entitled "The Struggle against Social
Despotism" in Lyman Abbott's magazine, The Outlook. The author
praised John Spargo's The Bitter Cry of the Children and Florence
Kelley's Some Ethical Gains Through Legislation for their forth-
rightness in placing the blame for the evils described "upon the
social system under which we live." He remarked that when Ameri-
cans read about Armenian massacres or slavery in the Congo they
cried out in horror and demanded that these crimes against humanity
cease. In such instances it was easy to see how innocent people were
crushed by conscienceless desire for wealth and power. "In the
meantime," the writer continued, "before our eyes there are whole
classes of people who are as truly subject to the tyranny of death,
disease, want, vice, and crime as any Armenian or Congo native to
his master." But in these cases it is harder for us to recognize the
forces of evil. "We have no sultan or king we can call to account,
we see no murderer with sword or gun whose hand we can stay, and
we ignore the fact that the responsibility rests upon ourselves."63

Charles Edward Russell aimed a similar blow at public apathy
in the Christmas issue of Everybody's Magazine in 1907. He repro-
duced an album of drawings depicting drab and sorrowful scenes
in the slums during the holiday season. "Look at these pictures,"
Russell urged, "and reflect that for all these things not the ways of
Providence are responsible, nor inevitable conditions, nor the vain
imaginings wherewith we salve our consciences, but merely you
and I."64

Several years later a student who investigated juvenile delin-
quency in a poverty-stricken metropolitan district suggested that the
indictments issued against the youthful offenders should have been
directed at the municipality itself "for allowing any of its children
to start the battle of life so poorly equipped and so handicapped for
becoming efficient American citizens."65 Ruth S. True, in a parallel
study of neglected girls in the same blighted neighborhood, recalled
that she had once found a crippled baby, cold and miserable, in a
barren tenement room. "She was as helpless and defenceless a little

The Search for Truth 138

creature as could well be met," reported Miss True. "But this was
the treatment an indifferent community tolerated for her. And she
was only one."66

The cure for poverty suggested by the Progressive reformers
(that is, those who reached maturity around 1900) was simply cor-
rection of unjust and degrading conditions of work and living.
Specifically they proposed legislative action to establish and maintain
fair standards of wages, hours, and housing; prohibition of child
labor and regulation of dangerous trades; compensation of labor for
unemployment, accidents, sickness, and old age; organization of
more vigorous and more effective public-health programs; institution
of more abundant recreational facilities and a more practical system
of public education; and restriction of immigration.67

Nearly all of these reforms involved limitations on private-
property rights and extension of public authority into areas previ-
ously regarded as the exclusive preserve of individual initiative. Taken
one by one the proposals were neither novel nor drastic. Collectively,
however, they implied that a new attitude toward politics and
economics was taking shape. In particular they demonstrated a strong
tendency to substitute public benefit for private profit as the measure
of industrial efficiency. At the time of its formulation supporters of
the program called it "preventive social work."68 Today, when most
of it has been adopted, we recognize it as the core of "the welfare

state."

Preventive social work continued the distaste for charity which
had characterized the earlier scientific philanthropy. "Charity is not
a balm with which to shrive our souls, but a blot on our enlighten-
ment and civilization," declared Lee K. Frankel, manager of the
United Hebrew Charities of New York City.69 The new movement
placed less emphasis than the older one on the rescue of individual
victims of social maladjustment, stressing, instead, the need for
battling with the forces that every day added new recruits to the
army of the miserable. Reduced to its simplest terms, preventive
social work meant improving the environment of the economically
weaker members of society. "Let it be this," urged Hunter, "rather
than a barren relief system, administered by those who must stand
by, watching the struggle, lifting no hand to aid the toilers, but
ever succoring those who flee and those who are bruised and
beaten."70

The New View 139

The use of the phrase "aid the toilers" was not merely poetic.
Like Josephine Shaw Lowell (who had been the preceptress of
several of them) the younger reformers were increasingly of the
opinion that the poverty problem and the labor problem were inex-
tricably interwoven. They doubted whether the former could be
handled until more satisfactory solutions had been found for the
latter. Frankel told an audience of social workers in 1906:

The basis of all philanthropic effort must rest, not upon a maudlin
sentimentality directed toward the victims of our own near-sighted
and narrow policy, but shall be expressed in terms of exact justice.
The opportunity must be given to all individuals to earn their living
(it is true by the sweat of their brow), but under conditions which
permit of decent living, proper housing, wholesome nourishment,
and providing for the proverbial rainy day.71

Tawney voiced the same opinion in his inaugural address as director
of a British foundation for the elimination of poverty.

The problem of preventing poverty is not primarily to assist in3£
viduals who are exceptionally unfortunate. It is to make the normal
conditions under which masses of men work and live such that they
may lead a healthy, independent, and self-respecting life when they
are not exceptionally unfortunate; so that when they are exception-
ally unfortunate, misfortune may not descend upon them with the
crushing weight with which it falls today upon large sections of the
working classes. . . .72

Advocates of the new view contended that the environment
of the working classes, at work, at home, and at play was still
inadequate to meet the material and spiritual needs of human life.
They deemed it both necessary and possible for society to raise the
standard, and thereby eradicate the social causes of poverty. They
did not suppose that, even then, want would entirely disappear. They
believed, however, that individuals would be in a much better
position to achieve the station in life to which their energies and
talents entitled them if, by joint action, men thrust aside the obstacles
that no man alone could move. When people are freer than at
present to control the material conditions of their own lives, said
the spokesmen of the new view, they may be poor, but they will
not be a social problem, and the shadow of their suffering will no
longer lie so dark and heavy across the conscience of the nation.73

CHAPTER 9

A Factual Generation

The beautiful industrial idyls of half a century ago, the charming
inculcation of thrift to the desperately poor, the stories of the
astounding progress of the newsboy and the grocer's clerk (who in-
evitably marries the daughter of his employer), have given way to
somber investigations of newsboys, messenger boys, grocers' clerks^ *
et al.> and to a very wide bookshelf on the influence of evil industrial
conditions upon the virtues and vices of the industrial classes.

Walter Weyl, The New Democracy.

There is only one sure basis of social reform and that is Truth— a
careful detailed knowledge of the essential facts of each social prob-
lem. Without this there is no logical starting place for reform and
uplift.

W. E. Burghardt Du Bois and Augustus Granville Dill,
The Negro Artisan.

FACTS, facts piled up to the point of dry certitude, was what
the American people then needed and wanted," wrote Ray
Stannard Baker in explanation and justification of the muck-
raking movement.1 A muckraker himself, Baker was one of the most
resolutely objective observers of American life in the early years of
the twentieth century. His comment has a bearing not only on
prewar journalism, but also on the general spirit of the Progressive
era. It was a time when realism influenced, if it did not entirely
dominate, many aspects of American culture. Religion, philosophy,
the arts, politics, and philanthropy were all agitated by efforts to
discover and disclose the tangible truths of actual life.

Perplexity and suspicion sharpened the public demand for facts.
At the turn of the century a generation born and raised on farms or

140

A factual Generation 141

in small towns was attempting to make the best of an environment
that was more urban, cosmopolitan, and industrial than Americans
had been accustomed to regard as normal. Many people were discon-
tented with conditions and circumstances that seemed not of their
own making. Harassed by rising living costs and troubled by a sense
of insecurity, they were eager to have light shed on problems that
baffled them. For decades critics had been condemning the growth of
monopoly, the arrogance of the plutocracy, and the pervasive corrup-
tion of politics. If these oft-repeated animadversions accomplished
nothing else they whetted the public appetite for more specific
evidence of malfeasance in business and government.

Quite apart from the concern aroused by such darker specula-
tions, a lively interest in the contemporary scene was stirring in the
nation. The everyday environment of the average American had
changed and was continuing to so rapidly that those who sought to
describe it approached the task with the zest of adventurers exploring
a newly discovered continent. Their enthusiasm for the freshness
and vitality of the scene was catching. All agreed that a new civiliza-
tion was taking shape, but none knew what its form was or would
be. Not only among artists and writers, but also in the people as a
whole, there was a feeling of participation in events of more than
passing importance and of sharing experiences that deserved to be
recorded accurately.

Curiosity regarding the facts of American social life contributed
to the vogue of confession literature in the late nineties. The Lexow
Committee's investigation of police corruption in New York City
and William T. Stead's exposure of civic immorality in Chicago
imparted a certain respectability to the ever present interest in the
mysteries and miseries of the urban underworld. Rumors and occa-
sional revelations of similar conditions in other cities made it seem
almost a mark of good citizenship to be well informed about the
extent of vice and crime in one's community. Magazines that still
shied away from fiction dealing realistically with social outcasts
vied with one another to print the memoirs of hobos, beggars, and
ex-criminals. Although usually presented in the guise of moral tracts,
these confessions were often unblushingly realistic in style and
content. Rightly or wrongly— for the veracity of some is questionable

The Search for Truth 142

—they were accepted as truthful records of experience in the seamy
side of life. As such, they helped to bridge the chasm between Vic-
torian gentility and twentieth-century frankness.

In the nineties few issues excited more interest than vagrancy.
In that depression-ridden decade the tramp problem reached alarming
proportions. To many observers the hobo seemed the most obvious
manifestation of the economic dislocations and social maladjustments
of the times. He was ubiquitous and easily identifiable— the least
common denominator of unemployment, parasitism, crime, and vice.
Moreover, he was the best example that the age afforded of the
individual's protest against social pressures. The tramp was a voluntary
exile from society; his mode of life and standard of values contrasted
sharply with those of ordinary mortals. Where other men sur-
rendered their lives to the pursuit of comfort and security, he held
fast to man's choicest possession, freedom. Not infrequently, there-
fore, a measure of grudging respect was mingled with the scorn that
an outraged society heaped on him.

Appropriately enough the most influential of the confession
writers, Josiah Flynt, gained his reputation by a series of sketches
of hobo life. Although he was later hailed as the originator of
"realistic sociology" and ultimately awarded the title of "the first
muckraker,"2 it was in no spirit of scientific inquiry that Flynt
began the wanderings he described in Tramping with Tramps (1901).
The son of a Chicago newspaperman and the nephew of Frances
Willard in whose Evanston home he spent part of his restless boy-
hood, Flynt was the victim of psychological conflicts that made it
impossible for him to accept the discipline or assume the responsibili-
ties of normal life. Instead, he ran away; he rode the freights, begged
handouts, slept in haystacks, served a brief jail sentence, and tasted
the other hardships and pleasures of an outlaw existence.

Flynt was a bona-fide hobo for only about eight months, in
1889. After the publication of his first article on the subject in 1891
his excursions into hoboland were undertaken, ostensibly, at least,
for purposes of research. Short though it was, this early experience
equipped him with an understanding of tramping as a way of life.
He had the true hobo's disdain for "enforced vagrants"; that is,
migratory workers and the itinerant unemployed. His interest was
centered exclusively on the men who had chosen vagabondage in
preference to more conventional professions. He maintained that

A Factual Generation 143

these "voluntary vagrants" were more interesting and worthy of
study than the larger group of men who had been driven into
vagabondage by the pressure of adverse economic conditions.3 Flynt's
point of view, unfortunately, was as characteristic of middle-class
opinion as of the attitude of the tramps themselves.

Although Flynt called the real tramps "human parasites" and
"discouraged criminals," his description of their life was remarkably
free from censure. He told how hobos duped kindhearted citizens
and evaded the forces of the law as though the sly and cynical
dodges they practiced were the most natural things in the world.
Nothing about their mode of existence surprised or shocked him
unless it was society's willingness to put up with the expense and
nuisance of supporting large numbers of idle, homeless, and useless
persons. He had a fellow craftsman's admiration for those members
of the guild who excelled at their calling, and in one typical passage
he asserted that success in tramping demanded the same combination
of "diligence, patience, nerve, and politeness" as eminence in any
other field of endeavor.4

The distinction of Flynt's work lay in its flavor of authenticity.
Flynt had lived with tramps and he wrote as an insider. His matter-
of-fact account of tramping adventures was absorbing, not because
the story was either moving or exciting, but because it bore the
stamp of truth. Flynt's method was realistic; where others had
studied the problem academically, he had examined it "on its own
grounds and in its peculiar conditions and environment."5 He had
arrived at the method by chance rather than design, but his success
with it convinced other investigators that the scientific approach to
social research was through firsthand explorations of life in the lower
depths.

What Flynt had done for tramps Owen Kildare sought to do
for the related but not identical class of city bums. Like Flynt, Kil-
dare had intimate personal knowledge of his subject matter. Unlike
Flynt, however, Kildare was not a fugitive from respectability, but
an eager convert to it. Orphaned while still a baby, thrust on the
street to forage for himself when a boy of seven, he had grown to
manhood in the debauched Bowery district during the 1870's and
1880's. For more than twenty years, according to his own report,
he led an existence that was as depraved as his environment. Kildare's
regeneration was effected by a young schoolteacher whom he met

The Search for Truth 1 44

in 1894. She taught him not only to read and write, but also inspired
him to give up, at the age of thirty, his old associations and to find
respectable employment. After numerous tribulations, which he
described in his popular autobiography, My Mamie Rose (1903),
Kildare became a feature writer for the Sunday supplements, a
reporter for several New York newspapers, and a frequent con-
tributor to the family magazines.

Kildare's most informative book was My Old Bailiwick (1906),
a circumstantial expose of the haunts and habits of the 50,000 bums
who inhabited New York's cheap lodginghouses. Some of his con-
temporaries were already beginning to regard these shambling, de-
feated men with a certain tolerance and sympathy. Not so Kildare,
whose social attitudes had been strongly influenced by the genteel
schoolteacher who had reshaped his own life. To him they were
"has-beens," "human junk," and "wrecks of their own folly"—
objects of concern but not fit subjects for pity. He was a reformer
as well as a journalist, and his aim was to awaken in his readers a
sense of responsibility for eliminating a public nuisance.

The thesis of Kildare's book was that, far from being unduly
harsh, the life of the "has-been" was enervatingly soft. This was
precisely the point that advocates of scientific philanthropy had been
making for fifty years or more, but Kildare buttressed the argument
with a wealth of detail gained from his own experiences as a Bowery
bum. He challenged the popular notion that flophouses were vermin-
infested dens of iniquity, asserting, to the contrary, that although
drab and depressing, they were seldom either particularly dirty or
peculiarly wicked.6 Their chief characteristic, and their worst danger,
as he saw it, was cheapness. Like everything else the "has-beens"
required to stay alive, shelter could be obtained for a pittance. It was
not necessary for them to seek regular work because they could
live on the small sums obtained from begging or occasional odd jobs.
The bare essentials of existence cost these confirmed idlers so little
that they were able to spend a larger proportion of their incomes
on dissipation than any other group in the population. Hence, Kildare
concluded, they had no economic incentive to reform.

In My Old Bailiwick Kildare proposed the application of a
rigorous work test to all vagrants. We must "assay this mass of
useless humanity with the acid of honest work," he declared.7 "Work
for those who will, reformatories for those who will not" was his

A Factual Generation 145

slogan. It is apparent from his other writings, however, that Kildare
recognized that work alone was an inadequate answer to the problem.
In his novel The Wisdom of the Simple (1905) he described the
honest poverty of low-income working-class families as a brutish
state; and in his autobiography he confessed that his own regenera-
tion had been accomplished by love and understanding rather than
by stern warnings to work or go to jail.

The real message of Kildare's work was that indifference, even
more than laziness, was at the root of the "has-been" problem.
Existence for the bums had deteriorated into "a drifting, a sliding
to nowhere."8 They had lost the will to aspire toward a better life;
they were content with too little. In this sense their indifference was
but another form of a malaise that infected all society. "We, the more
fortunate, are also afflicted with that dread disease, carelessness, and
so long as we get 'ours'— no matter how we get it— we do not care
much for aught else."9 Were it not for a kind of social sickness we
would not permit human wrecks to drift through our communities
as aimlessly, helplessly, and dangerously as derelicts on the sea. In
our own way, he suggested, the rest of us are very nearly as indif-
ferent to the possibility of a more wholesome society and as little
inclined to work for it as the most wretched of the dispirited men
we call bums.

In the same year (1891) as Flynt published his first article on
tramps a young Princeton graduate embarked on what he called
"an experiment in reality." Walter Wyckoff, a widely traveled son
of Presbyterian missionaries to India, became convinced in his mid-
twenties that the "slender book-learned lore" acquired in his formal
education had failed to provide him with "vital knowledge of men
and the principles by which they live and work."10 His experiment
consisted of going to work as an unskilled laborer. It lasted for
eighteen months, during which he beat his way from Connecticut
to California.

"I am vastly ignorant of the labor problem and am trying to
learn by experience," Wyckoff wrote at the outset of his sojourn
among the workers. Starting as a day laborer on a construction gang,
he worked successively as hotel porter, ditchdigger, farm hand, and
teamster's helper in a logging camp. In Chicago, between spells of
unemployment, he obtained an unskilled job in a factory and worked

The Search for Truth 146

on a road-building crew at the World's Fair grounds. West of
Chicago he passed from one odd job to another until he reached
the Pacific coast.

Wyckoff's sampling of manual occupations was necessarily-
haphazard, and he stayed on no job long enough to acquire more
than a superficial understanding of the workers' problems. His
"experiment in reality" was a courageous personal undertaking and,
from the author's point of view, a rewarding spiritual exercise; but
it was not a systematic survey of labor problems. Nevertheless, when
Wyckoff published The Workers (1897 and 1899), a lengthy report
of his experiences as an unskilled laborer, the book was immediately,
and justly, hailed as an important contribution to sociology. Like
Flynt, Wyckoff broke new ground both in subject matter and
methodology. He directed attention to a segment of the population
that had been largely ignored by previous writers, and he demon-
strated that the way to investigate living issues was to consult life,
not books.

Wyckoff's example was soon followed by numerous students.
Lillian Pettengill, identifying herself as "a college woman," became
a domestic servant in order to obtain "a look upon the ups and downs
of this particular dog-life from the dog's end of the chain."11 Other
researchers, assuming disguises appropriate to the task, infiltrated
beggardom, Southern mining and lumber camps, and the ranks of the
unemployed.12 Even persons such as Jack London, with much less
reason than Wyckoff to bemoan lack of worldly knowledge, engaged
^ in role playing to secure data for books and articles.13

The Woman Who Toils (1903) by Bessie and Marie Van Vorst
was a companion volume to Wyckoff's study of unskilled male
workers. Its subtitle, Being the Experiences of Two Gentlewomen
as Factory Girls, conveys something of the tone and contents but
does the work less than justice. As a picture of industrial conditions
the Van Vorsts' book marked an advance over Wyckoff's effort
because it devoted more space to factory employment, covered a
wider range of jobs, and was more critical in approach. When a friend
asked whether it was not true that factory girls were generally happy,
Marie Van Vorst replied with an asperity foreign to Wyckoff:

Is it a satisfaction to the leisure class, to the capitalist and em-
ployer, to feel that a woman poorly housed, ill fed, in imminent
moral danger, . . . overworked, overstrained by labour varying from

A Factual Generation 147

ten to thirteen hours a day, by all-night labour, and destruction of
body and soul is happy?
Do you wish her to be so? Is the existence ideal?14

The chief weakness of The Woman Who Toils, as of other
books of its kind, was that the situations described were artificial.
It was neither a scholarly work nor an authentic record of working-
class life. The Van Vorsts were rich women on a temporary excur-
sion into poverty. They could, and they apparently did, escape from
privation whenever they chose by changing their clothes and resum-
ing their proper stations in society. They could not experience the
anxiety of real workingwomen who were unable, except in dreams,
to transform themselves into ladies. Nor could these two gentle-
women, by working at a few jobs in several scattered cities, obtain
the data necessary for a comprehensive analysis of women's work.
When the authors attempted to generalize on the basis of their
limited observations, their conclusions were suspect because the
supporting evidence was fragmentary, the experience factitious.

Unlike the numerous accounts of contrived adventure, The
Long Day (1905) was— or at least professed to be— the true story
of an honest-to-goodness working girl related by herself. Published
anonymously, but attributed to Dorothy Richardson, The Long Day
chronicled the experiences of an eighteen-year-old girl from rural
Pennsylvania who came to New York to earn a living. She had no
family at home, no friends in the city, and very limited funds. Her
search for decent lodging at a price she could pay acquainted her
with slovenly boardinghouses, rented rooms in tenement flats, and
appalling institutional "homes" for working girls. "Work or starve,
work or starve" was the refrain that drummed in her ears as she made
the rounds of factories and shops. She found, to her dismay, that it
was possible both to work and to go hungry, for, although jobs were
available, it was not always possible to support oneself on the wages
offered inexperienced help.

For several years "Rose Fortune," as the writer called herself,
spent the long day in factories making paper boxes, artificial flowers,
jewel cases, and underwear. She "shook" in a laundry and demon-
strated wares in a ten-cent store. While thus engaged she became
familiar with the literary and musical tastes of her coworkers, their
slang, recreation, and moral standards. She also came to know the
fatigue, the layoffs, the danger of fires, accidents, and occupational

The Search for Truth 148

illness to which all of them were sometimes exposed. Her experiences
and observations were not unlike those of the Van Vorsts, but
instead of being a sequence of arbitrarily terminated incidents, The
Long Day provided a connected narrative of one woman's adjustment
to the task of supporting herself.

The Long Day was a success story. Not that Rose Fortune
married a duke or a millionaire, but she did manage to summon
enough energy after the day's work to study shorthand and typing,
so that eventually she was able to obtain a responsible secretarial
position. Implicit in the book, however, was the recognition that for
many working girls the ending was less happy. They did not have
the health, the education, or the will to surmount the obstacles and
withstand the temptations that confronted them. Few of them ever
found the key to even such a modest success as Rose Fortune
achieved: learning to work instead of being worked.

Narratives of personal experience popularized and humanized
sociological literature, but they were individual case histories, not
finished examples of social research. The writings of WyckofT, the
Van Vorsts, and Miss Richardson, in common with nearly all studies
of working-class life undertaken around the turn of the century,
tended to be descriptive rather than analytical. Labor was still such
a largely unexplored subject that books about it, even by experienced
investigators, often resembled travelogues. In America's Working
People (1900) Charles B. Spahr made an ambitious but not entirely
successful attempt to survey the labor scene in the nation as a whole.
Like a conscientious sight-seer Spahr covered all the high spots on
a well-planned itinerary, but he executed the project in such a hasty
and summary fashion that his book did little more than convey a
sense of the enormous complexity of American economic life.15
Working on a smaller canvas, A. M. Simons, in Vackingtonjon (1899),
presented a brutally realistic picture of bad working and worse
living conditions in the Chicago stockyards district. The coal strike
of 1902 called forth both an official investigation and numerous
journalistic accounts of life in the coal fields.18 Shortly thereafter
Peter Roberts described the people and social institutions of Pennsyl-
vania's "islands of anthracite" as minutely as though the region were
a remote archipelago in the South Seas.17

Very gradually more consciously analytical studies began to take

A Factual Generation 149

their place beside the volumes of description. W. E. B. DuBois at
Atlanta University and Mary White Ovington in New York launched
the inquiries that were to yield the first scientific knowledge of the
status of the Negro in American society.18 Government statisticians
and agents of private philanthropic societies made several careful
attempts to ascertain the economic condition of immigrant groups.19
The settlement houses conducted block-by-block surveys of poverty-
stricken neighborhoods and encouraged young college graduates to
examine the homes, health, budgets, and employment of families
living in the vicinity of the settlements.20 With each year official or
semiofficial tenement-house investigations became more frequent
and thorough, providing interested students with a new fund of
information on the housing— and inferentially on the home life— of
the poorer classes.21

Of all these undertakings the one that was to exert the greatest
influence on later social research was the New York tenement-house
investigation of 1900. Although carried out by a state commission,
the enterprise was almost entirely a project of the Charity Organiza-
tion Society of New York. In 1898 the Society had established a
tenement-house committee whose members included such well-
known and experienced advocates of housing reform as Felix Adler,
Richard Watson Gilder, E. R. L. Gould, and Jacob Riis. Failing in
an attempt to obtain adoption of improved construction standards in
the metropolitan building code adopted in 1899, the committee
prepared and held a tenement-house exhibition in the spring of
1900. It was this exhibition, which acquainted both the public and
influential officials of the state government with the seriousness of
existing conditions, that prompted Governor Theodore Roosevelt
to appoint the New York State Tenement House Commission.

The exhibition was itself a notable achievement in graphic pres-
entation of sociological data. It was hardly news to any New Yorker
that housing in the slums was appallingly bad, but never before had
so many facts about the problem been assembled in so informative a
way. Arranged by Lawrence Veiller, secretary of the tenement-
house committee, the exhibits included more than a thousand photo-
graphs, detailed maps of slum districts, numerous statistical tables and
charts, and papier-mache representations of tenement blocks. These
displays not only showed how many tenement rooms were without
outside light or ventilation, but also correlated information on pauper-

The Search for Truth 150

ism and disease with housing conditions. Among the most alarming
revelations was that even worse buildings than were to be found in
the historic slum districts were being erected at the rate of several
thousand a year in new areas of the expanding city. Veiller's purpose
in the exhibition was to make clear that working-class families were
more poorly housed in New York than in any other city of the
civilized world, and that they were required to pay more in rent-
approximately one fourth of their earnings— than was demanded of
workers for better homes in other communities.22

Many of the data originally compiled for the exhibition were
incorporated in The Tenement House Problem (1903), the two-
volume report that Robert W. De Forest and Veiller submitted in
the name of the State Tenement House Commission. De Forest,
chairman of the Commission and president of the C.O.S., was a
corporation lawyer who had been drawn into philanthropy, and in a
sense into the reform movement, through the influence of Josephine
Shaw Lowell.23 Veiller, who was secretary of the Commission, con-
tributed an essay tracing the history of the tenement problem since
the 1830's, analyzing earlier attempts to deal with it, and describing
the present condition of the tenement population. Once again, as in
the C.O.S. exhibition, he made the point that the tenements housed
not only "the drunken, the dissolute, the improvident, the diseased,"
but also "the great mass of the respectable workingmen" and their
families.24 Technical experts employed by the Commission called
attention to defects in the type of tenements then being constructed
in respect to light, ventilation, sanitation, fire danger, and privacy.
The report also contained detailed recommendations for changes in
the existing tenement-house laws, specified improvements and altera-
tions necessary to bring existing structures to a minimum standard of
safety and decency, and suggested administrative machinery to make
the tenement laws enforceable.

All the recommendations contained in the report were put into
effect.25 The Tenement House Problem was thus not only the most
thorough and constructive examination yet made of the housing
situation in any American city, but also the most effective in securing
remedial action. For almost a decade De Forest's and Veiller's report
stood as a model of social research, impressive equally in method-
ology and practical results. It demonstrated that social evils long
denounced in general terms could be analyzed factually, that specific

A Factual Generation 151

remedies for their correction could be prescribed, and that those
remedies would be applied if convincing evidence of their need and
appropriateness was presented to the public. The lesson of the
tenement-house investigation seemed to be that the path to reform
lay through research.

Robert Hunter's Poverty (1904), like the books by Flynt,
Kildare, Wyckoff, the Van Vorsts, and Miss Richardson, was based
in large part on the author's own experiences and observations. The
experiences on which Hunter drew, however, were quite different
from those of the writers mentioned. In the eight and a half years
that intervened between his graduation from Indiana University and
the publication of Poverty, Hunter had lived in close contact with
the poorest and most degraded elements in the population, but he
had lived among them as a social worker and settlement resident. He
wrote, therefore, as a professional rather than as an amateur sociolo-
gist—as a trained and sympathetic observer, but not as a direct par-
ticipant in the struggles of the poor.

Hunter explained that his book did not pretend to be a scientific
or exhaustive study of all the conditions, causes, and problems of
poverty. Nevertheless, his approach to the topic was broader and
his handling of the material much more searching than his disclaimer
would suggest. His purpose, as he put it, was to "state the problem";
that is, to define poverty, estimate its extent, reveal the evils it pro-
duced, and suggest remedial measures that society might adopt to
deal with it. Poverty was therefore hardly the "modest undertaking"
that Hunter called it. Regardless of its limitations it was the most
comprehensive as well as the most controversial treatment of the
subject yet attempted in the United States.

Much of the controversy was provoked by Hunter's assertion
that even in fairly prosperous times no fewer than 10,000,000 persons
in the United States lived in poverty. Nearly all readers were shocked
by this figure, and many were inclined to believe that Hunter had
erred in placing the number of the poor so high. Conservatives, in
particular, were unwilling to admit that distress was anywhere nearly
as prevalent as Hunter indicated. Liberals, on the other hand, ac-
cepted his statement as proof of the need for reform. Hunter himself
admitted that his estimate was a guess derived from such statistics as
were available on pauperism, case loads of charitable societies, evic-

The Search for Truth 152

tions, pauper burials, unemployment, industrial accidents, and wage
rates. He contended that if a truly scientific census of the poor
were taken the results would probably show that many more than
10,000,000 persons were in a condition of poverty.26

The argument between those who thought Hunter's estimate
too high and those who believed it substantially correct was not
easily resolved, because neither side was in possession of facts to
support its position. In the absence of factual knowledge, opinion
regarding the extent of poverty was necessarily determined by
personal bias, temperament, and casual observation. Nevertheless,
the dispute was by no means barren of results. It revealed how little
reliable information on the condition of the poor and of the working
class was available even to specialists in the field and demonstrated
that no generally satisfactory conclusions on the extent of poverty in
the United States could be drawn until a great many more basic
data had been accumulated.

This result was not entirely accidental. In one sense Hunter's
whole book was a plea for recognition of the nation's obligation to
ascertain how well or badly its people fared. Neglect even to inquire
into the amount of distress in the state struck him as symptomatic of
"the grossest moral insensitiveness" on the part of society.27 He
observed that Americans, although they spent more money on
statistical investigations than any other people, knew less about the
economic circumstances of their fellow citizens. We do not know
how many of the poor we have; we do not know whether their
number is increasing or decreasing; we cannot be sure whether, in
proportion to population, we have more or fewer of them than
other countries. "But ought we not to know?" he demanded. Until
we do, he said, all our boasts that we have no real poverty problem
in the United States must be taken as evidence of either ignorance
or indifference.

Twenty years before Hunter wrote Poverty William Graham
Sumner had objected that there was no possible definition of "a
poor man." He deplored the use of the phrase because he deemed it
dangerously elastic and capable of covering a host of "social fal-
lacies."28 Unlike Sumner, Hunter and many other social scientists
active in the decade and a half before World War I believed that
poverty could be defined in arithmetical terms. To them "a poor
man" meant any person who, for whatever reason, was unable to

A Factual Generation 153

provide himself and his dependents with a decent standard of living.
They maintained that it was possible to determine the components
of a decent living and also to compute the income required to
obtain it. According to their definition, therefore, the poor were
simply those members of society whose incomes fell below the
established minimum.

In A Living Wage (1906) the Catholic economist John A. Ryan
formulated a statement of a fair standard of living that was consistent
with progressive thought on the matter. His contention was that an
American family deserved more than just enough food, clothing, and
shelter to support life on a subsistence level. The essential physical
requirements should be provided in such quantity and quality as to
enable the family to maintain both health and self-respect. The
family budget should provide for savings and insurance; it should
also permit expenditures for "mental and spiritual culture"— educa-
tion, reading, modest recreation, and membership in church, labor
union, and clubs. These things should be paid for from the father's
earnings. It should not be necessary for the wife or the children
under sixteen to work outside the home.29

Ryan adopted $600 a year as a rough approximation of a living
wage for the head of a family of moderate size in the United States
in 1905.30 This figure was necessarily arrived at in a somewhat
arbitrary and deductive fashion. At approximately the same time,
however, studies of the cost of living and of the actual expenditures
of working-class families were being made by settlement workers
and statisticians employed by state and federal bureaus. These
inquiries confirmed Ryan's view that anything less than $600 a year
was not a living wage and indicated that in the larger cities an annual
income of from $650 to $800 was needed to support a family of
normal size.31

More difficult to ascertain, but equally important to know, was
the proportion of American workers who failed to obtain a living
wage. Ryan estimated that at least 60 per cent of the adult male wage
earners received less than $600 annually.32 Other economists who
worked on the same problem in the next few years came to an almost
identical conclusion. Generally speaking, they found that adult male
workers in the leading industries seldom received less than $450 or
more than $600 a year and that the average annual wage was between
and $600. Their figures indicated that from one half to two

The Search for Truth 154

thirds of the workers earned less than enough to provide a family
with the vaunted American standard of living.33

In the new view of poverty these underpaid workers comprised
the most numerous of the poor. It was the dearth of exact and
reliable information on their way of life, betraying an apparent
indifference toward their plight, that Hunter thought disgraceful.
The organization of the Charities Publication Committee in 1905
attested that other prominent social workers shared his opinion. The
new group was composed of Jane Addams, Jacob Riis, and influential
representatives of the organized charity and settlement movements;
it served as an editorial board for the magazine Charities; and its
primary objective was "the undertaking of important pieces of social
investigation not provided for by any existing organization."34

Under the skillful direction of Edward T. Devine and Paul U.
Kellogg, Charities, which had originated as the house organ of the
New York C.O.S., had rapidly developed into the leading American
journal of social work. Even before 1905 the magazine had sponsored
several social surveys, but, as Devine admitted, these were "adolescent
gymnastics" compared to the comprehensive program of research
inaugurated after the formation of the Publications Committee. In
the first year of the Committee's existence Charities and the Commons
(as the magazine was known after 1905) published two special issues:
"The Negro in the Cities of the North" and "Next Door to Con-
gress."35 Both were significant studies, but the latter, a seventy-page
report on housing, health, education, and child labor in Washington,
D. C, was more in harmony with the muckraking spirit and seems
to have attracted greater public interest. One of its principal points
was that Congress had neglected to provide the District of Columbia
with a child-labor law, a compulsory-education law, and with other
legislation "now deemed essential in modern communities." Devine
later boasted that more social legislation was enacted for the District
in the five months following the appearance of "Next Door to
Congress" than in the five years preceding it.36

Encouraged by the favorable reception accorded the Washing-
ton issue, the Publications Committee accepted the suggestion offered
by an official of the Allegheny County (Pennsylvania) Juvenile
Court that a similar study be made of Pittsburgh. A distinguished
staff headed by Paul Kellogg and including Florence Kelley, John

A Factual Generation 155

R. Commons, and Robert A. Woods was recruited to conduct the
survey. The Russell Sage Foundation, whose president was the ubi-
quitous Robert W. De Forest, assumed the major share of the
considerable costs of the venture. Field work, carried out in 1907
and 1908, was sufficiently near completion by November of the
latter year to make possible an exhibition, patterned after the New
York tenement-house exhibition of 1900, to display the findings of
the survey staff to the people of Pittsburgh. Devine summed up these
findings at a joint session of the American Economic Association
and the American Sociological Society in December, 1908; and an
abbreviated version of the survey report appeared in special issues of
Charities and the Commons in the winter of 1909.37

The Pittsburgh survey was the first attempt made in the United
States to examine thoroughly and at close range the conditions under
which working people spent their lives in a modern industrial com-
munity.38 The survey staff put the steel district under a microscope,
and the facts revealed were far from pleasant. So far as the findings
are susceptible of brief summary, they showed an incredible amount
of overwork, reaching the extreme of a twelve-hour day and seven-
day work week in the steel mills and railroad switchyards; wages
that, though not lower than in other cities, were adjusted to the
requirements of a single man rather than to the needs of a responsible
head of a family; still lower wages for women, averaging about
one half to one third the earnings of men; an absentee capitalism with
social and economic results similar to those produced by absentee
landlordism; and the destruction of family life under the combined
pressures of the extraordinary demands of work on men, women,
and children, the prevalence of preventable diseases such as typhoid
fever, and the cruelly high toll of industrial accidents.39

The total picture that emerged from the laboriously compiled
volumes of the survey was one of appalling waste resulting from
social timidity and disinclination to interfere with the rites of money-
making. In Pittsburgh, lives, health, strength, education, even the
industrial efficiency of workmen were treated as things of little
worth. The important matters were output, time, cost, and profit.
In comparison to these considerations human lives and happiness
were relatively unimportant. "Make do, wear out, use up, replace,
discard" applied no less to men and women than to other expendable
items in the industrial process. It was easier and cheaper to do business

The Search for Truth 156

that way, and it did not seem to matter much that this false economy-
imposed unnecessary hardship and suffering both on individual
families and on the entire community.

The Pittsburgh survey was by far the most important of the
prewar social investigations. It was discussed and studied not only in
Pittsburgh but throughout the country. To its influence Jane Addams
attributed "the veritable zeal for reform" that agitated the United
States between 1909 and 1914.40 Supporters of nearly every good
cause drew inspiration and ammunition from its pages; yet it was
not a propagandistic or polemical work. It commanded respect
because it was an outstanding piece of research— honest, informative,
reliable. The facts it disclosed were their own best advocates. The
survey findings, especially as they related to the waste of human
resources, were taken to heart by a nation just awakening to the
realization that conservation was as vital to its future as exploitation
had been characteristic of its past.

In the years following the Pittsburgh survey social research
flourished as never before and seldom since. A considerable part of
this activity was subsidized by the Russell Sage Foundation. Incor-
porated in 1907, the Foundation was pledged by the terms of its
charter to use an endowment of $10,000,000 for "the improvement
of social and living conditions in the United States." That the Russell
Sage Foundation was not to be a charitable organization of the old-
fashioned alms-dispensing type was made clear by its first president.
"The Foundation will not attempt to relieve individual or family
need," De Forest announced. "Its function is to eradicate so far as
possible the causes of poverty and ignorance, rather than to relieve
the sufferings of those who are poor and ignorant."41 A contribution
toward the support of the Pittsburgh survey was the first substantial
grant made by the Foundation in pursuance of its objective. In the
next ten years it made grants totaling almost $2,000,000 to encourage
research and published nearly fifty volumes, among which, in addi-
tion to The Pittsburgh Survey, were Lawrence Veiller's Housing
Reform (1911) and Mary E. Richmond's textbook of social case
work, Social Diagnosis (1917).

The Sage Foundation organized its own surveys and exhibits
department in 1912 and carried out community surveys, on the
Pittsburgh model, in St. Paul, Scranton, Topeka, Ithaca, Atlanta,

A Factual Generation 157

and Springfield, Illinois.42 Meanwhile, with Charities and the Com-
mons significantly retitled The Survey, the Charities Publication
Committee made a social study of Birmingham, Alabama, and fol-
lowed up the Pittsburgh survey with a review of labor problems in
all the major steel centers of the country.43 Enthusiastic support for
the community survey idea came from the "Men and Religion
Forward" movement, a nationally organized effort to stimulate
interest in social service among churchgoing men. Through this
movement laymen in numerous cities were induced to make a sys-
tematic canvass of social conditions in the neighborhood of their
churches.44

The state and federal governments responded to the factual
temper of the times, or at least to the pressure of what was called
"the social welfare lobby," by creating new fact-finding agencies
and by appointing an unprecedented number of official investigatory
commissions. The prewar years were, indeed, the golden age of
commissions. It was a time when the solution to every difficult
problem seemed to lie in submitting it to a group of good citizens
and disinterested experts who were expected to examine the question
from all sides and then recommend suitable legislation. In practice
legislatures did not always heed the recommendations of the advisory
groups, but very few reforms were enacted until after one or more
commissions had conducted lengthy hearings into the need for and
practicability of the proposed remedies. Regardless of immediate
political consequences, some of the commissions made valuable con-
tributions to research. Thus, in 1908, Frances Kellor and Lillian
Wald participated in an official inquiry into "the condition, welfare,
and industrial opportunities of aliens in the State of New York"—
topics about which there was a plethora of talk but little knowledge;
and in 1910 the governor of Illinois named Charles R. Henderson and
Dr. Alice Hamilton to a commission charged with exploring the
previously neglected field of occupational disease.45

An outpouring of reports on the condition of labor and the
standard of living reflected the mounting interest and activity in
social research on the part of agencies of the national government.
Reports of federal investigations not only became more voluminous
and broader in scope than before, but also more specific in presenta-
tion and more critical in tone. These tendencies were especially
marked after Charles P. Neill succeeded the politic Carroll D. Wright

The Search for Truth 158

as Commissioner of Labor in 1905. Wright's annual and special
reports had often been couched in such cautious language that their
meaning was ambiguous, but Neill did not hesitate to speak the
truth bluntly. The new commissioner showed his colors in 1906
when he and the New York social worker James B. Reynolds
prepared a scathing account of unsavory conditions in the meat-
packing industry.46 The tenor of the reports of the Bureau of
Labor during NeilPs administration is indicated by a typical passage
from one of them:

The female workers in the confectionery industry are largely
unskilled, they are usually young, to a considerable extent they are
foreigners, and they are unorganized. Consequently they are pecu-
liarly unable to have any effective voice in fixing their wages. They
take what they can get and, at least in the establishments covered
by this investigation, the majority were plainly getting less than a
living wage.47

Under NeilPs direction agents of the Bureau of Labor conducted the
most thorough investigations yet attempted in the United States of
social insurance and of the condition of working women and children.
As will be shown in later chapters both of these studies exercised a
strong influence on contemporary reform movements.

The last volume of the report on woman and child labor had
scarcely appeared when the newly organized Children's Bureau
began a series of investigations of infant mortality. Little was known
about the death rate of American babies because, owing to incom-
plete birth registration in most states, there was no reliable informa-
tion on the birth rate for the nation as a whole. Julia Lathrop, a
former Hull House resident who was the first director of the
Children's Bureau, proposed a novel method of inquiry. Her agents
began their investigations with infants' births rather than with their
deaths. They studied the social, economic, and civic environment of
each child born in a given community in a given year and traced
the baby's history through the first year of its life, or through that
portion of a year that it lived. After these studies were under way
the Bureau also began to collect and interpret statistics on maternal
mortality. Josephine Goldmark, herself a skilled research worker, has
described the shock the early Children's Bureau reports administered
to the nation's complacency:

A Factual Generation 159

We had taken for granted American superiority in sanitation and
health. American plumbing was the sign and symbol, the world over,
of our national pre-eminence in physical care. Now for the first time,
in this house-to-house canvass, was disclosed a very different and
horrifying state of affairs. Babies under one year were dying at a
rate unthought of: for the United States as a whole, a quarter of a
million babies were dying each year. The maternal death rate was
also shocking, higher than the deaths of women from any other
cause except tuberculosis, higher than in any other civilized country
of the world.48

The reports bore out the charge made half a century earlier by
Horace Greeley that poverty was both the mother and murderer of
children.49 They showed that it was twice and, in some circum-
stances, more than three times as dangerous to be born into a poor
family as in one of comfortable economic circumstances.50

On the same day as the Children's Bureau began operations-
August 23, 1912— President Taft gave his approval to an act authoriz-
ing the appointment of a Commission on Industrial Relations. The
measure had been proposed and drafted by a group of economists
and social workers, headed by Devine, who were anxious to have
an impartial but official body conduct a nationwide survey of the
deeper causes of industrial unrest.51 Controversy between Taft and
Congress over the composition of the Commission delayed the start
of the investigation until after the Wilson administration took office.
When the Commission at length began its work the nine members,
representing industry, labor, and the public, faced a difficult assign-
ment. They were to "inquire into the general condition of labor in
the principal industries of the United States, including agriculture,"
and to "seek to discover the underlying causes of dissatisfaction in
the industrial situation."52 To gather data on these controversial
topics the Commission held numerous public hearings, many of them
quite heated, in cities throughout the country, and listened to the
often-contradictory testimony of hundreds of witnesses.

Members of the Commission, seriously divided in their sym-
pathies and social philosophies, were unable to agree on the conclu-
sions to be drawn from the evidence submitted. However, in the
opinion of Basil Manly, director of research and investigation, the
hearings showed that the incomes of from one third to one half of
the families of wage earners in manufacturing and mining were

The Search for Truth 160

inadequate to support "anything like a comfortable and decent
condition."53 He stated that there were four basic causes of labor
unrest: unjust distribution of wealth and income; unemployment
and denial of opportunity to earn a living; partiality toward em-
ployers in the writing, administration, and adjudication of law; and
denial to employees of the right and opportunity to form effective
labor organizations.54 Testimony received by the Commission on
the last point was voluminous and eloquent.55

The Commission's report, Industrial Relations (1916), contains a
wealth of information and opinion on the status of industrial democ-
racy in the United States on the eve of World War I. It is interesting
not only as a summary of the amount and kind of data on working-
class problems available to students at the close of the Progressive
era, but also as an encyclopedia of the varying sentiments toward
labor then current. The advance registered since the turn of the
century both in the accumulation of specific information and in the
development of enlightened attitudes was impressive. Nevertheless,
the eleven volumes of Industrial Relations are quite as interesting
for the gaps in knowledge that they reveal as for the positive informa-
tion presented.

One area in which knowledge was still very sketchy became
apparent shortly after the Commission began its hearings. During
the winter of 1913-14 reports of widespread unemployment began
to be received from several large cities. In this instance foes of the
Wilson administration were inclined to give credence to estimates
placing the number of the jobless at astronomical figures, while
administration supporters tended to minimize the seriousness of the
problem. Much of the testimony submitted at the Commission's
hearings related to unemployment; but because of the failure of
Congress to appropriate funds to complete the tabulation of the
portions of the census of 1910 dealing with unemployment, the
most recent comprehensive data on the subject were fourteen years
old. The Commission asked police officers in various cities to make
a count of the jobless, a method that a well-qualified expert
characterized as hurried, ill advised, and subject to political pressures.56
In the absence of any national machinery for collecting current statis-
tics on unemployment, Industrial Relations could offer no reliable
data on the actual number of people in the United States who were

A Factual Generation 161

out of work. It could only report that want of work was a major
cause of discontent.

The need for more serious study of this vital problem was the
theme of Frances Kellor's Out of Work (1915). On the subject of
unemployment, she remarked, "research is limited, knowledge cir-
cumscribed, and literature local or indefinite." While creating com-
mittees or commissions to investigate almost every other problem,
she continued, we have permitted the wilderness of unemployment
to remain unexplored, have allowed its waste to go unchecked, and
have suffered its causes to remain obscure.57 Miss Kellor carefully
examined all the existing sources of information on unemployment
and shrewdly analyzed the defects in prevailing methods of gathering
data. Her point was that no trustworthy statement on the extent of
joblessness could be made as long as neither states nor the federal
government required employers to furnish employment records.58

As Miss Kellor well realized, the fundamental problem was much
more complex. What was needed was not simply improvement in
reporting methods and statistical techniques, but a keener awareness
than had yet developed of the fact that unemployment was a genuine
and constant problem even in prosperous America. No book, no
matter how penetrating, could create that awareness. Despite all the
demonstrations and protestations of economists and sociologists to
the contrary, the notion still persisted that any man willing to work
could find a steady job— somewhere. Not literature but bitter experi-
ence would finally be required to destroy that happy delusion.

The foregoing recital of the piling up of inquiry upon inquiry,
survey after survey, raises certain difficult questions. Were not the
friends of reform mistaken in assuming that repeated investigations
of the same old problems signified progress? Was not the bustling
activity in social research but a form of busywork that was at best
a substitute for positive remedial action? That reform was effected
in spite of the penchant for meticulous, time-consuming investigations
will be shown in subsequent chapters. Nevertheless, it is all too true
that the appointment of a commission to inquire further into an
obvious evil may mean that reform is being sidetracked rather than
advanced. To demand "an objective, impartial re-examination of all
the issues involved" is a favorite method of halting reform. The

The Search for Truth 162

resulting investigation is not research but a device to kill time and
destroy interest. It satisfies the popular clamor— loud but short-lived
—that "something must be done" without seriously disturbing the
privileged groups that are determined that nothing detrimental to
their interest shall be done.

In 1913 R. H. Tawney delivered some remarks on the status of
social research in England that were very nearly as applicable to the
American as to the British situation.

Social research has in the last ten years become an industry. Whilst
progress was undoubtedly retarded in the 19th century through the
contempt of our grandfathers for economic investigation, there
seems some danger that it may be paralysed in the 20th through a
superstitious reverence for accumulated facts. . . . There are, it is
true, a considerable number of matters where practical action is de-
layed by the absence of sufficient knowledge. There are more, per-
haps, where our knowledge is sufficient to occupy us for the next 20
years, and where the continuance of social evils is not due to the fact
that we do not know what is right, but to the fact that we prefer to
continue doing what is wrong.

All that economic inquiry can do, Tawney concluded, is to give
society the information upon which to found reasonable judgments,
and thereby to deprive it of excuses for either inaction or unwise
action.59

In the United States, as in Tawney's England, the great outburst
of interest in social investigation came during a period of political
liberalism. Conversely, the development of political progressivism
coincided with the rise of social research. The two movements were
so closely related that it is almost impossible to separate one from
the other. Disembodied ideals of justice, fair play, and democracy
were not sufficient to cope with the complex issues of modern
industrial society. Reform could no more be effected by platitudinous
avowals of righteousness than by generalized denunciations of evil.
Nor could research alone accomplish reform. Mere exposure of
wrongdoing did not automatically produce remedial action. But until
practices long tolerated had been clearly demonstrated to be un-
natural, unnecessary, and detrimental to society scant attention was
paid to them. Even then action sometimes faltered. On the whole,
however, the first decade and a half of the twentieth century was

A Factual Generation 163

unusually productive of social reform. It was a time when the will
to improve conditions was guided and strengthened by knowledge
gained from factual inquiry, when the zeal to do good was matched
by eagerness to learn how and what to do.

CHAPTER JO

The Literary Record

But what, asked the wanderer insistently, does LIFE mean in this
vast gray labor-house?

Robert Herrick, A Life for a Life.

By learning the sufferings and burdens of men, I became aware as
never before of the life-power that has survived the forces of dark-
ness, the power which, though never completely victorious, is contin-
uously conquering. The very fact that we are still here carrying on
the contest against the hosts of annihilation proves that on the whole
the battle has gone for humanity.

Helen Keller, Out of the Dark.

DURING the Progressive era the life and condition of the poor
received almost as much attention in imaginative literature as
in factual social research. From the 1890's onward American
writers were less and less content to chronicle only the affairs of the
polite and prosperous classes and became increasingly interested in
describing the adventures of the unrefined and underprivileged
members of society. Many authors sought to depict the romance of
poverty; others presented realistic accounts of lower-class life; and
still others attacked the sins of society and glorified individual or
class protests against injustice.

One of the characteristics of the literature of the period was an
unusual emphasis upon strength and vitality. In its cruder forms this
amounted almost to a worship of force. In its better manifestations it
expressed itself in enthusiasm for humanity in the mass and reverence
for the life power in individuals. There was a close connection be-
tween this literary tendency and the political and economic struggles
of the time. As American democracy broadened and strengthened

164

The literary Record 165

its base, American literature expanded its horizons to include con-
sideration of types, classes, ways of life, and social issues that, for the
most part, had previously been excluded from its compass.

In an unfavorable but not entirely hostile review of Frank
Norris' McTeague (1899) a critic remarked that the book dealt with
"a class of people that story-tellers generally avoid or at least seldom
select for their chief characters."1 There was a good deal of truth in
this observation. Popular writers had already begun to exploit low
life and to search out the local color of the tenements, but they had
not yet shown much interest in the lower middle class, the stratum
of society to which Norris' hero and heroine belonged.

The McTeagues were not poor in the ordinary meaning of the
word. Mac was an unlicensed dentist with a fair practice; Trina, his
wife, was the pretty daughter of a frugal and respectable immigrant
family. They lived in a small apartment in a business block, a modest
but neat and comfortable home. Both husband and wife were indus-
trious, and for several years after their marriage they prospered. Like
others in their position, however, Mac and Trina were economically
insecure. Thoughts of money were hardly ever out of their minds.
In the best of times they had to skimp and be cautious in their
spending. A misfortune such as sickness or loss of work might thrust
them into real want.

The critics acknowledged that the minutely detailed picture
Norris drew of the McTeagues' domestic economy was an accurate
rendering of the way of life of people who lived above, but danger-
ously near, the poverty line. The realism of the setting, however,
was one of the critics' chief objections to the book. Instead of
praising Norris for exploring a new literary milieu, they scolded him
for wasting undisputed talent on unworthy and disagreeable material.
"It is about the most unpleasant American story that anybody has
ever ventured to write," complained one reviewer. With few excep-
tions the critics expressed the hope that Norris' next plot would fall
in "more pleasant places" and that in the future his books would be
"not less true but a good deal more agreeable."2 ,

The popular literature of the day contained many heroes and
heroines who were poorer than Mac and Trina, who lived in more
sordid environments, and who suffered crueler blows of fate. There
were, for example, the Jewish peddlers and sweatshop workers in

The Search for Truth 166

the stories of Abraham Cahan, I. K. Friedman, and Myra Kelly,
compared to whom the McTeagues were affluent. The confessions
of beggars, bums, and thieves, which enjoyed wide popularity around
the turn of the century, introduced readers to persons whose occupa-
tions were less reputable and whose morals were worse than Trina's
and Mac's. As for a disagreeable plot, what could be more depressing
than the tale Alice Hegan Rice unfolded in Mrs. Wiggs of the
Cabbage Patch (1901)? The setting was a shanty in a miserable
district on the outskirts of a Southern city, the heroine an impov-
erished widow who tried in vain to support her five children by
taking in laundry. Reduced to its essentials this extremely popular
and highly regarded novel was the record of a poor family's battle
against starvation, with the eldest child, a boy of fifteen, sacrificing
his youth, his health, and eventually his life in the unequal struggle.

Despite the wretchedness and sorrow they described, works
such as Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch were acceptable both to
the critics and the reading public because, unlike McTeague, they
were suffused with optimism. One could read them with assurance
that love would conquer all and that everything, or nearly every-
thing, would turn out right in the end. Mrs. Wiggs's philosophy of
life, "keeping the dust off rose-colored glasses," was shared by other
heroes and heroines of popular fiction. They met adversity bravely
and resourcefully— and they could be helped. If criminals, they could
be reformed by appeals to their better instincts; if poor, they could
be lifted out of the slough of despond by kind treatment. James L.
Ford attributed the success of books of this type to the authors'
ability "to make the reader feel benevolent without spending a cent."
He confessed that he had read Mrs. Wiggs with moistened eyes, and
laid it down with the conviction that "if I had Rockefeller's money
I would give that woman all our family washing."3

Trina and Mac differed from Mrs. Wiggs not only in class, but
also in psychological make-up. Norris once defined romance as
"the kind of fiction that takes cognizance of variations from the type
of normal life."4 In this sense McTeague was a romantic novel, for
the leading characters were abnormal persons. The mischances Mac
and Trina encountered were not all of their own making, but their
inability to surmount these reverses resulted from their personal
peculiarities. Being the kinds of individuals they were, they could
neither help themselves nor be assisted by others. Their doom

The Literary Record 167

was sealed from the instant they met. From the author's point of
view the deterioration of the McTeagues' fortunes was important
mainly because, with each downward step, the basic elements of
their characters became more obvious. Their personalities were not
so much shaped as revealed by a succession of disasters. At last, when
they had sunk about as low in the social scale as they could go, the
McTeagues showed themselves to one another, and to the reader, in
their true colors: Trina a miser and Mac a brute.

Norris was not alone in believing that people in poverty were
more "real" and "natural" than those in prosperous circumstances.
This was a widely held view, and it was a major factor in arousing
literary and artistic interest in the poor. McTeague was out of step
with the literary trend of the time because in it Norris made the
bad characters of his hero and heroine the central theme of the book.
Most of the literary treatments of poverty contemporaneous with
McTeague dealt with good people in bad environments. Some writers
searched the ranks of the poor to find individuals who departed from
the type of normal life, not in depravity, but in unusual virtue and
heroism. Mrs. Rice declared: "Looking for the nobility that lay
hidden in the most unpromising personality became for me a spiritual
treasure hunt."5 Others, however, were content with less extraor-
dinary figures; they attempted only to show that the poor were
very much like people at other levels of society. Thus, in The Good
of the Wicked (1904) Owen Kildare stated that his purpose was
"to demonstrate that beneath the rough manner and language of my
people of the tenements emotions and sentiments common to all
humankind are stirring."6

Nearly everyone could subscribe to the dictum that human
nature was basically the same at every economic level. In practice,
however, most popular writers continued to regard the poor with
pity strongly tinged with condescension. They portrayed the victims
of poverty indulgently, delighting in their childlike simplicity,
ignorance, and uncouthness— in all the outward signs of their in-
feriority. There was something humorous about the usually ill-fated
efforts of the poor to become like other people; that is, to obtain
education, respectability, and security. It was even funnier when
they fell in love; for to storytellers the very notion of Cupid going
slumming was comical. Besides, the uninhibited poor were true

The Search for Truth 168

romantics who could be counted on to do anything for the sake of
love. In "The Uses of Adversity" Myra Kelly wrote with seeming
approval of a tenement girl who exposed her unruly younger brothers
to one disease after another. While the boys were shut up in the
charity ward of a hospital the girl was free to pursue her romance
with a pushcart peddler.7

The chief difference between fiction of this sort and O. Henry's
stories of "the four million,, was that the former gratified the
reader's sense of superiority, the latter appealed to man's fellow feeling
for others of his kind. O. Henry did not patronize the shopgirls,
typists, waitresses, and lonely transients he wrote about. He could
not, for he was nearly of a piece with them. It was not a matter of
indifference to him that working girls lived in tiny rooms whose
walls closed in upon them like the sides of coffins, that they were
expected to get along on six dollars a week, or that they sometimes
went hungry. It did not strike him as ridiculous that the poor should
seek pleasure, crave affection, spend money foolishly, or hold fast to
quixotic ideals. In these respects they were no different from the
rich. But their stories seemed to him more moving. They worked
harder; they paid more dearly for their follies; their standards were
more difficult to maintain; and they gave more freely of themselves.

At his best O. Henry could stir depths of compassion in the
reader that his rivals in the field of light fiction could not even touch.
Quite often he peopled his weekly stories with stereotypes, but (as
Vachel Lindsay observed) in some of his tales

The masks fall off for one queer instant there
And show real faces: faces full of care
And desperate longing: love that's hot or cold;
And subtle thoughts, and countenances bold.8

In "The Cop and the Anthem," for example, the hero was a bum,
and O. Henry drew him to conform to the standard literary specifica-
tions of the type. The man's name was Soapy; he didn't like to
bathe; he was lazy and shiftless; he actually wanted to be arrested
so that he could be sent to the workhouse to while away the winter
at the taxpayers' expense. But "for one queer instant" Soapy's mask
dropped. He saw clearly "the degraded days, unworthy desires, dead
hopes, wrecked faculties, and base motives that made up his existence."
He resolved to reform, and at that very moment, of course, was

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arrested. His earlier wish was realized, his later resolution shattered
beyond repair.9

Soapy was regenerated, but he was not saved; for O. Henry,
although ever hopeful and always willing to respond to the best that
was in his characters, was not so determinedly optimistic as the other
purveyors of commercial fiction. His stories were not all compounded
of sweetness and light. "The Furnished Room" told of a suicide in
one of the most frightful chambers in American literature. And it
was not only love that drove O. Henry's people to despair. "Of what
she earned, Dulcie received six dollars per week," he observed at
the start of "An Unfinished Story." This was an unfinished tale, he
said, because the future of a girl who had to manage on such a
precarious budget was not very certain. He hated skinflint employers
and those other oppressors of the poor, landladies and middle-aged
mashers. One rooming-house keeper reminded him of "an unwhole-
some, surfeited worm that had eaten its nut to a hollow shell and
now sought to fill the vacancy with edible lodgers."10 Piggy, a
would-be seducer of shopgirls, was such an expert in his line that
he could look at a prospective conquest "and tell you to an hour how
long it had been since she had eaten anything more nourishing than
marshmallows and tea."11

O. Henry proved the thesis that authors had long asserted: that
the lives of the poorer classes were as abundantly endowed with the
elements of romance as those of the well-to-do. He read between
the lines in what he would have called "the book of life" and found
ideas for stories in individuals and incidents that others would have
dismissed as unimportant. One reason for his success in finding
romance in unexpected places was that he pursued the chase relent-
lessly. It was his stock in trade, and he had a story to write, not when
the mood struck, but every week of the year. He had "the sense
of the marvelous," but it was a faculty cultivated and developed by
necessity as well as by inclination. Nevertheless, O. Henry was
uniquely suited by temperament to be a romancer. Where others
merely said, "Romance is all about us," he believed it sincerely.
There was something at once humble and chivalrous in his attitude
toward people. If a plain waitress imagined herself a sleeping beauty,
or a piano salesman fancied himself Sir Galahad, O. Henry was
willing to give each the benefit of the doubt. There was always the
faint possibility that they might be right; but if they were mistaken,

The Search for Truth 170

their dreams were, nevertheless, deserving of respect. And when the
magic gates failed to open, when the court slumbered on, or the
knight fell off his horse—when all that happened was disappointment
and heartbreak— that, too, was a tragedy to be felt and recorded.

One of the canons of commercial fiction, observed even by-
writers such as O. Henry who were truly sympathetic with the poor,
was that poverty was unimportant. The important matters, in litera-
ture as in life, were romance, comedy, tragedy, and nobility of
character. These were constants, existing independent of economic
circumstances, and it was the storyteller's task to find them wherever
they occurred. If they were discoverable among people in humble
walks of life, so much the better, for the locale was relatively new,
the material fresh and interesting. The poverty of the characters,
although incidental to the main theme of romance, contributed
atmosphere, poignancy, and a pathetic quality to the narrative.

Theodore Dreiser rejected this approach to literature. He thought
the writer's function was to tell the truth about human affairs, not to
find or fabricate romance. He described Sister Carrie (1901) as "a
picture of conditions done as simply and effectively as the English
language will permit." After the publication of Jennie Gerhardt
(1911) he said: "My own ambition is to represent my world, to con-
form to the large, truthful lines of life."12 Dreiser was unsophisticated
enough to believe that honesty was the best policy in art. His attitude
toward his craft may have been influenced by preliminary training as
a newspaper reporter and as a contributor of factual articles to the
magazines. It seems to have been strongly affected by his admiration
for realism in the graphic arts; and it is quite possible that he con-
sciously strove to introduce into fiction that same fidelity to life that
some of his contemporaries were bringing to painting.13

Neither as a man nor as an artist could Dreiser believe that the
economic circumstances of people counted for little. His own experi-
ence and observation taught him just the opposite. Possession or lack
of money seemed to him to make a lot of difference— sometimes all
the difference— in the way people behaved and were treated. He
knew that being poor meant going without the decencies, comforts,
and pleasures that human beings wanted and needed if their lives
were to have any meaning.

Dreiser, no less than O. Henry, was moved by the morning

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spectacle of "typewriter girls in almost stage or society costumes
entering shabby offices," and "boys and men made up to look like
actors or millionaires turning in to the humblest institutions."14 The
notion that the lives of the lower classes abounded in romance and
adventure, however, impressed him as false. "Humdrum," "barren,"
"lean," "narrow," and "pointless" were the words he used most fre-
quently to describe the drab and cheerless existence of the poor. The
poor, he knew, did not smile bravely through their tears: they
sweated and strained and cursed. Some of them had "a lean, pinched
appearance as though they were but poorly nourished or greatly
enervated." Others wore "a furtive, hurried look, as though the
problem of rent and food and clothing were inexplicable and they
were thinking about it all the time."15 Most of them were marking
time, struggling not so much to get ahead as to make ends meet.
The poverty they suffered was not "interesting" or "colorful." It
blighted, when it did not entirely destroy, love, joy, kindness, and
beauty.

Dreiser's attitude toward poverty coincided with that of the
literary realists of the 1890's and also with opinions expressed by
social workers after the turn of the century. His view, however, was
more the product of personal familiarity with the problem than of
reading or disinterested analysis of social conditions. "Unlike your-
self," he once told H. L. Mencken, "I am biased. I was born poor."16
Dreiser was an immigrant's son who had grown up in shabby neigh-
borhoods among disreputable people. He could recall a time in his
boyhood when his father had been out of work for more than a
year. As a youth he had worked at a succession of casual low-paid
jobs. On at least two occasions in his formative years he had experi-
enced spells of unemployment and mental depression that nearly
destroyed him. He was an authority on the "curious shifts of the
poor" because he was better schooled in poverty than in any other
subject.

Dreiser's characters often indulged in daydreams, not about
Prince Charmings or Good Fairies, but about "belonging," "having a
good time," wearing fine clothes, dining in expensive restaurants, and
obtaining responsible positions. These reveries were only a part of
their lives, however, for usually they were caught up in some serious
practical financial dilemma. If their dreams were tawdry, the problems
they faced were real enough. His first heroine, Carrie Meeber, came

The Search for Truth 172

to Chicago to find a job. Without training or experience to qualify
for any employment except the poorest paid, she had to go to work
in a shoe factory at four dollars and fifty cents a week. After paying
for her room and board she had fifty cents of her weekly earnings
left to spend on clothes and recreation. Even ten cents a day for
carfare was a luxury beyond her means. When she missed work for
three days because of illness she knew her job was gone and she
did not even return to the factory. "The winter was near at hand,
she had no clothes, and now she was out of work."17 It was a stroke
of luck for her that a genial salesman, frankly described as a masher,
offered to make her his mistress.

As related by Dreiser, the annals of the Gerhardt family read like
a case record prepared by a charity agent. At the start the father was
ill and unemployed. The Gerhardts "lived from day to day, each hour
hoping that the father would get well and that the glassworks would
soon start up." Jennie and her mother went to work as maids in a hotel.
Then a brother was arrested for stealing coal and, soon after, Jennie
herself got into trouble. Nobody was responsible for the Gerhardts'
misfortunes. They were the kinds of things that regularly happened to
the poor. Later, with the family resettled and everybody except the
mother and the very youngest children hard at work, "the closeness
with which their expenses were matching their income was an ever
present menace." Dreiser studied the Gerhardt budget carefully; he
showed how much each member contributed, and explained how
the total was paid out for rent, coal, light, food, clothes, medical
expenses, and installment payments on the furniture. The family
might have scraped through, leading a "straitened, humdrum life,"
had Mr. Gerhardt not been injured in an accident at work. Now
there was five dollars less a week coming into the treasury and a
larger outgo for medical care. "Either more money must come from
some source or the family must beg for credit and suffer the old
tortures of want."18 It was at this point that Jennie, like Carrie before
her, accepted the advances of a generous man.

Like many of his contemporaries Dreiser was intrigued by
tramps, whom he compared to "gulls or moles, or some different
and unsocial animal" that still found in man its rightful prey. They
did not suggest want or poverty to him so much as "a kind of devil-
may-care indifference and even contempt for all that society as we
know it prizes so highly."19 His special interest and sympathy,

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however, went out to those individuals who were less self-reliant,
who took life seriously and hence were tortured by it. For the men
and women who did the work of the world, and who, in trying to
get along as best they could, so often stumbled or made mistakes, he
had the tenderest compassion. Most of his characters were attempting
to rise out of the dreary environs of poverty into more spacious and
easy economic domains. Yet he was always conscious of the failures
and the "has-beens," whose paths turned downward and who no
longer had the will or the ability to reverse their course.

Dreiser's account, in Sister Carrie, of Hurstwood's sinking into
the sea of the forgotten men of the Bowery was remarkable both for
its detail and its restraint. He told the story objectively, as if the facts
alone were sufficient and needed no comment. Hurstwood's decline
was a slow process, and Dreiser recorded it minutely: the man's
growing lethargy and unsuspected diffidence, the hotel lobbies he
frequented, the jobs he obtained, the charities he patronized, the
weary miles he walked, the flophouses he slept in— even the ironic
circumstance that at the outset his good appearance and decent
clothes were a handicap in his fruitless search for a cheap "business
opportunity." Often Hurstwood thought that "the game was up"
and that he would "end his troubles"; but then he either had no
money to rent a room where he could turn on the gas, or, if someone
gave him a quarter or a dime, he remembered that he was hungry.
"It was only when he could get nothing but insults that death seemed
worth while." The time came at last, though, when Hurstwood
turned out the gas, then turned it on again, and applied no match.
" 'What's the use?' he said weakly, as he stretched himself to rest."20

Dreiser did not constantly and self-consciously insist, as did so
many other writers of the day, that humanity was the same regardless
of rank. He took that for granted. What impressed him were not the
obvious similarities between human beings but the astounding dispari-
ties in their material conditions. He thought the peculiar "color" of
modern life was imparted to it by the vivid contrasts between
extremes of wealth and poverty. The social contrast gave cities "a
gross and cruel and mechanical look"; its presence made society
seem "so harsh and indifferent" that Dreiser said he felt numbed
by it.21 Until relatively late in his career he assumed that the contrast
in conditions was not only unavoidable, but unexplainable. "The rich
were rich and the poor poor, but all were in the grip of imperial

The Search for Truth 174

forces whose ruthless purposes or lack of them made all men ridicu-
lous, pathetic, or magnificent as you choose."22 Only in this sense, in
their helplessness in the hands of an uncertain fate, were men truly
equal and alike.

To Dreiser, a truthful picture of the struggle of men and women
against unequal odds was beautiful in itself. It did not have to be
sweetened and prettified, as the popular writers tried to do; nor did
the drama need to be heightened by use of 'Variations from the
type of normal life." The romance, the comedy, and the tragedy
were in the reality of human experience— in the urgency of the
effort, the emptiness of the goal, and in the inevitable but ever
unexpected intervention of death. "We toil so much, we dream so
richly, we hasten so fast, and lo! the green door is opened. We are
through it, and its grassy surface has sealed us forever from all which
apparently we so much crave— even as, breathlessly, we are still
running."23

Considering the subjects they dealt with, the writers thus far
discussed voiced remarkably little protest against social injustice.
Alice Rice and O. Henry employed economic distress mainly as
an atmospheric background for romance. For all his interest in
poverty, Dreiser was even more concerned with the larger mystery
of life. There was no suggestion of social criticism in McTeague, and
although The Octopus (1901) tended strongly in the opposite
direction, Norris' conclusion was that protest was fruitless. In The
Octopus six men were killed in a pitched battle between agents of
the railroad company and the ranchers who were being turned off
their land; one woman died of starvation, and another was reduced
to prostitution; an upright rancher was forced to resort to bribery;
a faithful workman was turned into a hunted criminal; and an
inoffensive poet was driven to attempt murder. Norris showed that
all of these tragedies resulted from the policies pursued by the
railroad company. Yet, at the end, he insisted that they were but
trivial incidents in the growth, harvest, and marketing of the
"nourisher of nations," the wheat. The wheat was a "mighty world-
force" that neither ranchers nor railroad could control; and Norris,
despite his recital of evil, professed that "all things, surely, inevitably,
and resistlessly work together for good."24

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The note of criticism and protest that Norris sounded and then
muffled in The Octopus became almost the dominant one in the
literature of the following decade and a half. Numerous poets,
dramatists, and novelists brought to their work the reformer's ardor
and the muckraker's passion for facts. They were less given to
pondering the mysterious workings of the universe than to attacking
the inequities of a social system that imposed enormous disadvantages
on the many while conferring extraordinary privileges on the few.
The protests they raised were directed at man's inhumanity to man,
preventable cruelties, specific wrongs, and identifiable abuses. In
contrast to "The Man with the Hoe," which had fastened the
reader's gaze on the end product of economic oppression, their
novels, stories, plays, and poems bade the reader consider the social
processes that made the poor, in Vachel Lindsay's phrase, "oxlike,
limp, and leaden-eyed." Figuratively speaking, they examined the
social, legal, economic, and moral environment of the Hoe-man and
his children. They described the miserable hovel that served him as
a home, the loathsome, deadening toil that was his job, his misad-
ventures in the economic chance world, and the ramification of these
circumstances and events upon his progeny.

A contemporary critic objected that these authors made eco-
nomic hardship play the role Greek dramatists had assigned to fate.
Most of the writers did, in fact, regard poverty as an almost insur-
mountable obstacle that charity could not ameliorate nor individual
pluck overcome. Their characters succumbed to poverty, or tri-
umphed over it only by chance or selfish disregard for others. But
if the men and women they wrote about were often weak, they
were no weaker than the ordinary run of mortals; and the "imperial
forces" that shaped their destinies were man-made, not supernatural.
Typically, their heroes and heroines were caught and crushed in the
cogs of a social machine that was inefficient, poorly tended, and, in
terms of human costs, very expensive to operate.

It was the human costs that the literary radicals, like the re-
formers of the Progressive era, counted. Carl Sandburg spoke for all
of them when, at the end of the period, he chanted "Pittsburgh,
Youngstown, Gary— they make their steel with men."25 Twenty years
earlier, in "Gloucester Moors" (1900), William Vaughn Moody
likened the earth to a ship that was "blind astray" and captained by

The Search for Truth 176

"a haggard and ruthless few" who kept the masses penned below
deck. When asked to relieve the suffering of their human cargo, the
masters replied:

"Let be:
Our ship sails faster thus."26

In "The Brute" (1901) Moody compared the factory system to a
monster that fed on the limbs and brains of men, the souls of children,
and the hearts of women. He declared that mankind would obtain
no good from the brute— that is, industry— until it had been tamed
and tethered and "made to give each man his portion, each his pride
and worthy place."27

Robert Herrick, a colleague of Moody at the University of
Chicago, sent the hero of his novel A Life for a Life (1910) on a
voyage through the industrial regions. In the course of his wander-
ings he

breathed the deadly fumes of smelter and glass works, saw where
men were burned in great converters, or torn limb from limb upon
the whirling teeth of swift machines,— done to death in this way and
that, or maimed and cast useless upon the rubbish heap of humanity,
—waste product of the process.

The reason for all this suffering, according to the young man's guide,
was that "in this country, where Property is sacred, nothing is cheaper
than human life."28 Upton Sinclair analyzed the problem similarly.
He called Packingtown a jungle because "there was not a place in it
where a man counted for anything against a dollar."29 In quieter
vein the Yiddish poet Morris Rosenfeld told the sad story of a poor
old woman who was neglected in life but pitied and prayed for in
death:

The rich and the pious are nobly behaved:

A body— what matters? But souls must be saved.30

The body was worth exactly $100, according to Reginald Wright
Kauffman. In The House of Bondage (1910) he wrote circumstan-
tially of an employer's offer of that sum to the widow of a man
killed at work "as full payment for whatever inconvenience she
might have been occasioned by her husband's demise."31

One of the most frequently recurring themes in the literature
of protest was hatred of "toil." Earlier poets had sung of the dignity

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of labor, but Rosenfeld cried, "Oh, horrible toil! born of Need and
of Dread," and he asserted

This life crushing labor has ever supprest
The noblest and finest, the truest and richest
The deepest, the highest and humanly best.32

At one point in Jack London's semiautobiographical novel Martin
Eden (1909) the hero was forced to take a job in a laundry. For a
time he lived in "the unending limbo of toil," working before break-
fast, all day long, and far into the night. He had no time to read, to
write, or even to think. All he had energy left to do was get drunk
on the weekends. During one of his drinking bouts he realized "the
beast he was making of himself— not by the drink, but by the
work."33

Sandburg's poem "The Right to Grief" (1916) showed how
devoid of dignity labor could become. It was about a "stockyards
hunky" who made his living (a dollar and seventy cents a day, when
he worked) by sweeping blood off the killing floor. All he did the
livelong day, said Sandburg, was "keep on shoving hog blood ahead
of him with a broom."34 Another stockyards worker, Jurgis Rudkus,
in Sinclair's The Jungle (1906), discovered that "most of the men
hated their work. . . . They hated the bosses and they hated the
owners; they hated the whole place, the whole neighborhood—even
the whole city. ..." But their hatred was only partly engendered by
the hardness and unpleasantness of their work. Mainly it stemmed
from their conviction that the plants were crooked, rotten through
and through. There was no place for decency and loyalty in them.
The bosses grafted off the men, and the men grafted off each other.
Worse than the revolting labor was the certainty that "nobody rose
in Packingtown by doing good work ... —if you met a man who
was rising in Packingtown, you met a knave."35

The low esteem in which the writers held the prevailing social
order led them to condone unconventional and even lawless behavior
on the part of their heroes and heroines. Unlike the literati of earlier
generations they did not look upon the poor as a morally debased,
quasi-criminal element. On the contrary, they thought them a good
deal better behaved than their environment warranted. Appalled by
the corruption of the plutocracy and by the hypocrisy of existing
legal and economic institutions, they seldom presented immorality,

The Search for Truth 178

intemperance, and outbursts of violence among the lowly as peculiarly-
reprehensible. If, as often happened, their leading characters com-
mitted antisocial acts, the responsibility— as the authors saw it— lay in
the unjust organization of society. Brand Whitlock voiced the suspi-
cions of the whole school when he asked whether poverty was not
the one offense that society was sure to punish.

The tendency to deal lightly with the crimes of the poor was
well illustrated in Charles Kenyon's play Kindling (1911). Maggie
Schultz, the heroine of the piece, lived in a vile tenement; her hus-
band, a stevedore, was on strike. Discovering that she was pregnant,
and determined to obtain the means of giving her unborn child a fair
start in life, Maggie robbed her employer, a rich society matron who
was also the owner of the tenement in which Maggie and her husband
lived. The problem of the play was which was the more culpable,
the thief or her victim? the tenement dweller or the tenement owner?
the woman who took property that did not belong to her or the one
who compelled her tenants to live under hazardous and unhealthful
conditions by disregarding housing, fire, and sanitary ordinances?
The playwright obviously believed the tenement owner was the
more disreputable of the two, and he did his best to make his
audience concur in his judgment.

Even more frequently than in novels or plays, the early movie
scripts treated criminality on the part of the poor as the logical
result of deplorable social conditions. Edward S. Porter, who brought
the story film to the American screen, examined the problem in The
Ex-Convict (1905). The plot concerned a reformed criminal whose
police record made it impossible for him to obtain honest employ-
ment. Porter contrasted the barren room in which the poor man and
his family lived with the luxurious establishment of the rich manu-
facturer who fired the ex-convict from his job. Although a heroic
type, as attested by his rescue of the manufacturer's daughter from
almost certain death under the wheels of an automobile, the ex-convict
was so oppressed by the hunger and illness of his family that he
returned to crime, the one means of livelihood left open to him by a
vengeful society. Only fortuitous and, needless to say, extremely
unlikely circumstances permitted a happy ending for this sad tale.

Porter's Kleptomaniac (1905) compared the justice meted out
by the courts to rich and poor offenders. In this movie two women

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were arrested for theft. One, a banker's wife, was accused of shop-
lifting in a department store; the other, a poor woman, of stealing
a loaf of bread. When brought to trial, the poor woman's appeal
for mercy went unheeded and she was sentenced to jail. The rich
woman, zealously defended by an expensive lawyer and treated con-
siderately by the judge, was released with apologies. In an epilogue
Porter drove the message home remorselessly: money outweighs
bread in the scales of justice; for justice has but one eye and it is
fixed unwinkingly on gold.36

Not only Porter but other movie producers dealt frankly with
economic and legal maladjustments in the days when the picture
shows catered mainly to working-class audiences. For a few years,
during which the movies were subject neither to official censorship
nor to policing by the industry itself, the ever present and everlasting
need for more money than was at hand, the uncertainty and insecurity
of employment, the drain of sickness, the calamity of accidents, and
the anxiety wrought by the unequal operation of the law provided
the plot for many a screen play. Sometimes, as in The Eviction
(1907), a personal factor such as intemperance was acknowledged to
be the cause of poverty, and individual regeneration was advanced
as its cure. Frequently, however, as in The River Tragedy and The
Eleventh Hour, tragedy struck, not because of any moral defect in
the protagonists, but in spite of their virtue and in consequence of
their helplessness. Some films, such as The Miser's Hoard, allowed
pure chance to rescue the poor from their misery. In an astonishing
number, however, including The Need of Gold (1907) and Desperate
Encounter (1907), violence was presented as the only way out of
apparently hopeless economic situations. Far from condemning the
poor for their transgressions, the early movies often excused their acts
of violence as evidence of manly or womanly character.37

These rugged individualists who took the law into their own
hands were shown in a quite different light from the goodhearted
criminals of the 1890's. The latter had a soft side, a sentimental
streak that made them, so the authors declared, almost as human as
respectable, law-abiding citizens. But the rebellious heroes and hero-
ines of the plays, films, and literature of protest were made to seem
morally better than their low-spirited neighbors. The trouble with
most of the poor, said Vachel Lindsay in "The Leaden-Eyed," was

The Search for Truth 180

Not that they starve, but starve so dreamlessly,
Not that they sow, but that they seldom reap,
Not that they serve, but have no gods to serve,
Not that they die, but that they die like sheep.38

People such as Maggie Schultz in Kindling and the ex-convict in
Porter's film were not resigned to misery like dumb beasts. They were
alive, vigorous, and purposeful, and they struck back against blows
that less vital persons supinely accepted.

At first glance the cult of vitality and the adulation of the rebel
seem anachronistic in an age characterized by high concentration of
economic and political authority, an age in which, practically speak-
ing, individual protest counted for little. Nevertheless, though we
may talk glibly of the need for social action, it remains true that all
social movements have their origin in individual remonstrance. Behind
every reform are men and women too sensitive or too proud to abide
things as they are and brave or foolhardy enough to demand that
wrongs be rectified. The soundings of dissent were symptoms of
health, not only in American literature, but also in American society.
It was well that writers should recognize and emphasize the causes
of discontent; and it was a hopeful sign that their point of view,
however critical, was positive— that they put a high value on life,
believed that justice could yet be done, and admired the courage of
men and women who stood up for their rights.

During the first half of the Progressive era most of the radical
writers, with a few exceptions such as Sinclair, were more interested
in the individual than in the class response to social and economic
pressures. Their position was similar to that of Dreiser, who main-
tained for a long time that he "didn't care a damn for the masses"—
individuals were his only concern. Nevertheless, while the literature
of protest honored the strong man who struggled against injustice,
it was suspicious of the doctrine of individualism; for the writers
all declared that under existing conditions the fruits of personal
success, however and by whomever gathered, were bitter.39

No American author of the period was more torn between
admiration for the bold and lawless individual and allegiance to the
principle of class solidarity than Jack London. He confessed that in
his youth he had "no outlook, but an uplook rather."40 In Martin

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Eden London wrote about a young man, very much like himself,
who aspired to "win to the heights," who decided at an early age
to "fight his way on and up higher," and who boasted that "the race
is to the swift, the battle to the strong."41 Martin refused to remain
a "toil-beast"; he scorned "herd-creatures" with their "slave mo-
rality"; he sneered at the stupid bourgeoisie and loathed the contemp-
tible crowd. He laughed at a rich man who had "robbed himself of
life" in youth for the sake of an income of $30,000 a year in his
dyspeptic old age. But in his arrogance Martin cut himself off from
humanity. He could establish no kinship either with the poor or the
rich, the slaves or their masters. The end of the story found Martin
quite literally robbing himself of life by committing suicide.

London, too, was disillusioned by the barrenness of success. The
people with whom he mingled on the "parlor floor of society" seemed
to him insipid. Some were good, and some were mean, but the fault
with all of them was that "they were not alive" Unlike Martin Eden,
however, London attempted to bind himself to life by embracing
socialism. "I went back to the working class in which I had been
born and where I belonged," he said.42 He resolved his personal
"thought-chaos" by asserting that the only worth-while purpose to
which the exceptional man could put his talents was service in behalf
of the less able. The year before he died London wrote that the
strong man must "devote his strength, not to the debasement and
defilement of his weaker fellows, but to the making of opportunity
for them to make themselves into men rather than into slaves and
beasts."43

Around 1910 American literature, like American politics, took a
turn to the left. Only a few of the writers could say, as Dreiser did,
that they had been born in poverty, or maintain, with London, that
they belonged to the working class by right of birth. Many of them,
however, were unconsciously and almost unwillingly swept along
on the tide of radicalism. A settlement worker in Arthur Bullard's
A Man's World (1912) explained their predicament:

I had seen so much I could never forget. It was something from
which there was no escape. No matter how glorious the open fields,
there would always be the remembered stink of the tenements in my
nostrils. The vision of a sunken cheeked, tuberculosis ridden pauper
would always rise between me and the beauty of the sunset. A crowd

The Search for Truth 182

of hurrying ghosts— the ghosts of the slaughtered babies— would
follow me everywhere, crying, "Coward," if I ran away. The slums
had taken me captive.44

Who could be neutral in a contest that arrayed flesh and spirit against
dollars and cents? A sizable number of prominent authors now joined
Sinclair and London in the Socialist party. Even among those who
remained outside the party there were some who were so disgusted
with the waste and inhumanity of "the system" that they were half-
convinced that any change would be for the better; and numerous
writers, whether sympathetic to the movement or not, accepted the
eventual triumph of socialism as inevitable.

The shift in the writers' attitude was reflected in their work in
a growing emphasis on class, as opposed to individual protest.
London had made class war the theme of The Iron Heel (1908),
and even earlier, in The Silent War (1906), John Ames Mitchell
had described a giant workers' conspiracy to force millionaires to
submit to blackmail or suffer assassination. London's novel was set
in the future; Mitchell's was a curious and improbable blend of
social criticism and sentimental romance, climaxed, as the advertise-
ments for it proclaimed, by having "love and gratitude rise superior
to issues of world importance."45 There was no need for such far-
fetched plots when public attention was focused on the Wobblies
and their free-speech fights, the garment workers' strikes in New
York and Chicago, the Lawrence and Paterson strikes, and the
Ludlow massacre. Here were concrete examples of working-class
protest against industrial oppression. In view of the actual labor strife
of the time it is not surprising that the strike should loom as the
"revolutionary situation" in nearly all of the proletarian novels after
1910. Strike leaders assumed heroic proportions; strikers became
dauntless crusaders for justice; and the strikes themselves were
presented as battles in the cause of humanity. "There ain't no differ-
ence between one strike and another," cried the girl strike leader in
Bullard's Comrade Yetta (1913). The issue in each was identical:
"People fighting so they won't be so much slaves like they was
before." The "People in Bondage," said Comrade Yetta, were "start-
ing out for the Promised Land."46

The most ambitious of the proletarian novels, and the most
successful in showing the revolutionary implications of industrial
strife, was The Harbor (1915) by Ernest Poole. A Princeton grad-

The Literary Record 183

uate who had continued his education at the University Settlement
in New York, Poole, like his friend Bullard and several other settle-
ment associates, had been converted from social work to socialism.
The Harbor was written from the standpoint of a journalist who, at
first an interested but more or less objective observer of the labor
movement, found himself being drawn into and at length actively
and enthusiastically taking part in a maritime strike. The title of the
book might better have been given a plural ending, for it was the
story of the changing harbors of the port of New York that the
narrator, Bill, had known in the first thirty or thirty-five years of his
life. In his boyhood, from his home in Brooklyn Heights, Bill had
watched the harbor of sailing ships. This gave way, in his young
manhood, to the harbor of steam and steel, of efficient engineers and
large-visioned business executives whose success stories he chronicled
for admiring magazines. It was also the harbor of dockers and stokers,
of overburdened marine workers driven to revolt (that is, to strike)
by labor conditions that left them little better than galley slaves. The
third harbor was the one that was still struggling to be born. It was
the harbor of the workers, whose awakening consciousness and over-
powering vitality Bill sensed during the great shipping strike.

Part of the impressiveness of The Harbor lay in the weight of
factual information about maritime operations that the author skill-
fully presented to the reader. As he had demonstrated in his earlier
studies of the ravages of tuberculosis in the tenement districts and
of the effect of street trades on the health, morality, and occupational
opportunities of the children engaged in them, Poole was an able
and conscientious investigator. Furthermore, despite his hero's sym-
pathy with the strikers, Poole gave the impression of fairness. He
refrained from telling the story in simple black-and-white terms,
with wicked industrialists bent on crushing the good toilers. Never-
theless, Poole was very sensitive to the social contrast, and he
described it graphically. In the first chapter he explained how sod
had been laid and flowers planted on the roof of a tenement to
provide a back yard for a comfortable dwelling built in front of
and on a higher level than the tenement. Once a drunken dock
worker opened a trapdoor in the roof of the tenement and thrust
his dirty presence into the quiet garden. At the end of the story
Poole depicted a great liner putting out to sea. The rich passengers
idled on the decks and in their cabins, while, far down in the bottom

The Search for Truth 184

of the ship, stokers shoveled coal in time to the clang of a gong.

Poole's book was less an account of violence and injustice than
the record of a young writer's shifting allegiances in his search for
values. Perhaps it was this, more than anything else, that lifted The
Harbor out of the usual category of strike novels and gave it a
distinct place in literary history. Bill's earliest god was art; the next
was efficiency at whose shrine he worshiped alongside the business-
men and engineers; the last was the masses— "a huge new god, whose
feet stood deep in poverty and in whose head were all the dreams
of all the toilers of the earth. . . ,"47 During his years as a journalist
Bill had trained himself to observe and describe individuals, big men,
and persons who, for one reason or another, were newsworthy. Life
had then seemed an endless procession of "figures emerging from
dark obscure multitudes into a bright circle of light." But in the
strike he had to pay attention to and seek to understand the multi-
tudes. Gradually the crowd took on the form of an "awakening
giant," and Bill began to feel "What It wanted, what It hated, how
It planned and how It acted."48 Not the harbor, but the crowd-
slowly developing a sense of unity, haltingly learning to pull to-
gether, beginning to realize and to use its power— was the real subject
of his narrative.

With the appearance of The Harbor the literary revolution, at
least, was accomplished. Poole's protagonist reversed the usual course
of fictional heroes. Instead of seeking to rise superior to the mob, he
found his identity by immersing himself in it. The "dangerous classes"
were not dangerous at all: collectively they were the hope of the
world; individually they were "people as human as yourself, or
rather much more human," because they lived "close to the deep
rough tides of life."49 No longer helpless victims of conditions, the
members of the crowd were helping each other and themselves.
They were not waiting for the operation of natural laws, divine
intervention, or human kindness to improve their lot, but were
remaking society by their own efforts. They were to be envied, rather
than pitied or patronized; they held the future in their grip; and
they had "life power," a "boundless fresh vitality," a capacity to
survive defeat and emerge from each conflict stronger and more
resolute than before. This strike or that one might be broken, but
in the end the crowd would prevail, for it had what individual men
lacked: unlimited time and unflagging energy.

CHAPTER II

Art for Life's Sake

A concern with the abstract beauty of forms, the objective quality
of lines, planes, and colors is not sufficient to create art. The artist
must have an interest in life, curiosity and penetrating inquiry into
the livingness of things. I don't believe in art for art's sake.

John Sloan, Gist of Art.

What we need is more sense of the wonder of life and less of this
business of making a picture.

Robert Henri, The Art Spirit.

IN the periodic controversies that have shaken the American art
world the advantage has usually lain with the defenders of art for
art's sake and against the advocates of art for life's sake. This has
remained true despite repeated pronouncements by critics and others
in favor of an "American" or a "democratic" art. The principal
reason seems to be that in this country, contrary to common belief,
we hold art in very high esteem. We think of it as something apart
from and superior to the concerns of everyday life, and we are
affronted when those concerns intrude into art and thereby degrade
it to the level of the commonplace. For most of us art is so serious a
matter that we approach it with deference and are quite willing to
believe that its mysteries can be appreciated only by the knowing
and discerning few. Realism, in the sense of truthful rendering of
the facts and issues of actual life, has no place in this toplofty
conception of art. Its language is too coarse for the sensitive and
refined; it speaks too plainly to suit the sophisticated. Only when we
forget about art and concentrate our thoughts and energies on the
problem of living does art for life's sake flourish.

185

The Search for Truth 186

At the turn of the century no convention seemed more firmly
established in art circles than the rule that art and life, particularly
American life, were separate and incompatible. It was the settled
conviction of many artists, and of art patrons as well, that the
American environment was, for the most part, hopelessly inartistic.
Furthermore, if the purpose of art was "to delight" and "to give
joy," as the leaders of the profession seemed to believe, it followed
that artists must be even more careful than writers to avoid depicting
the unpleasant and "the low." "It is not the mission of art to grope
in the gutter in search of nasty things which have been swept there
out of the way of cleanly people," declared a columnist in an art
journal in 1905. "When an artist paints, not the pig sty— that might
be picturesque— but people and things only fit to be housed in it,"
he continued, "I contend he is tainting the whole atmosphere of art,
and ought to be suppressed."1

The estrangement of art from life did not go unnoticed by the
critics, and some of them decried the lack of interest shown by artists
in native and contemporary themes. In 1900 Sadakichi Hartmann
issued a "Plea for the Picturesqueness of New York" in which he
suggested to photographers that "many a portfolio could be filled
with pictures of our slums" and reminded them that "the art signify-
ing most in respect to the characteristics of its age is that which
ultimately becomes classic."2 John Corbin, writing in Scribner's
Magazine in 1903, observed that what American cities most needed
to make them seem beautiful was an artist capable of revealing "to
our duller eyes the beauties already there."3 The critic of the New
York Evening Post called for a revival of genre in order that some
worthy memory of American life in a time of emerging national
greatness might be bequeathed to posterity.4 Another writer warned
that if the savants of the future had to obtain their knowledge of
American civilization solely from pictures displayed at one of the
exhibitions of the National Academy of Design, they would be
led to believe that twentieth-century Americans plowed their fields
with oxen, entertained haloed angels in their homes, and regularly
encountered nymphs, mermaids, Pan, and Venus on their rambles.5

It was the beauty and wholesomeness of American life that the
critics wanted the artists to record, and it was the snobbish assump-
tion that American subjects were not good enough to paint that
they deplored. Consequently, some of them were shocked and angered

Art for Life's Sake 187

when, around 1905, the work of a group of realists, later dubbed
the "ash-can school," came to their notice. Instead of dwelling
on the pleasant aspects of the American scene, the realists chose to
emphasize the least pictorial and most unlovely phases of it. Not the
campus, the suburb, and the summer resort, not the architectural
wonders or the engineering triumphs, but the dirty back streets and
the tenement house, the coal wharf and the saloon were the kinds
of subjects painters such as Robert Henri, John Sloan, and George
Luks selected to record for posterity. There were protests that
Henri and his cohorts were derivative in style, that they had "a
slapdash way of laying color on," and that their palettes were so
dark that they might as well have painted in soot. For the most part,
however, criticism of their work was directed less at the ivay than
at what they painted. To one startled observer it seemed that the
Henri group "deliberately and conscientiously" depicted "the ugly"
wherever it occurred; and another raised the inevitable question of
who would want to hang such canvases on his living-room walls. "Is
it fine art to exhibit our sores?" he asked.6

Like certain of their contemporaries in literature, the realistic
painters irritated conventional people by giving an unwonted share
of their attention to the lowly and disreputable elements of society
whose existence was barely acknowledged by the more conservative
practitioners of the arts. The attitude of the critics, however, was
by no means entirely hostile to this development. James Huneker
admired the "absolute sincerity" of the realists and praised them
for perceiving that "character, too, is beauty."7 Others hailed Henri,
Luks, Sloan, William Glackens, and Jerome Myers as "men with
something affirmative and stimulating to communicate"; and one
champion of realism commented on the queer state of a public taste
that could simultaneously wax sentimental over pictures of French
peasants and scornfully reject frank depictions of American work-
ingmen and their children.8

The most serious opposition to realism in art came, not from
the critics, but from semiofficial bodies such as the National Academy
of Design. Dominated by men of established reputations, these
organizations were strongholds of artistic conservatism. They could,
and they did, exclude from their annual exhibitions the work of
artists whose originality and individualism were distasteful to them.
As a result the younger realists found it extremely difficult to exhibit,

The Search for Truth \8$

and for a long time they were almost unknown to the public. B. O.
Flower of The Arena, an enemy of monopoly in every sphere, saw
the struggle between the independents and the academicians as part
of the nationwide conflict between democracy and privilege. On the
one hand, he said, stood the men who believed in artistic freedom
and who sought to express in their work "the larger, truer life of
our day." Opposed to them were reactionary forces who "would
form a trust where the measuring rod of mediocrity would become
paramount, and where favoritism or subserviency to the ruling spirits
of the organization would be essential to success."8

The acknowledged leader of the realists in their revolt against
the conservative tendencies of the Academy was Robert Henri, a
dynamic teacher who for more than thirty years occupied strategic
positions at some of the most prominent art schools of the country.
The heart of his teaching was that the beauty of a work of art lay
in its execution rather than in its subject. In the hands of some
painters this doctrine has led to an extremely esoteric kind of expres-
sion, but in Henri's case it was accompanied by an injunction that a
work of art must be inspired by and must communicate an emotion
drawn directly from life. "The cause of revolution in art," he said,
"is, that, at times, feeling drops out of the work and it must fight
to get back in again." He believed that the great artists were those
who were alert and responsive to life, who took a keen interest in
the occurrences of their own time, and who had the skill to express
the vital quality of their interest in their work. The kind of pictures
he recommended to his classes were the ones that seemed to carry
with them "the feel and the way of life as it happened, and as it was
seen and understood by the artist."10

The alleged "cult of the ugly" inaugurated by Henri and the
other realists was, to the painters, the cult of the actual. Although
these men differed from one another in many respects they had in
common an objective rather than an introspective turn of mind.
They were curious about their surroundings and their fellow men,
and they relished the urban scene all the more because it was not
pretty. In the streets, the markets, the water fronts, and tenement
districts they saw a vigorous, lively quality which they admired
more than charm or quaintness. It was characteristic of them to
speak seriously of "the wonder of life" and "the marvel of existence."
They often called their paintings "human documents," "human his-

Art for Life's Sake 1*9

tories," or "chapters out of life." Once an artist has grasped the
reality of beauty in man and nature as they are (ran their doctrine)
he does not need to falsify to make his subjects romantic, or senti-
mentalize to make them movingly beautiful. This reverence for life
colored their vision of reality. Today, after the passage of half a
century, the love they felt for their world, their sympathy for the
common man, and their delight in revealing unsuspected beauty in
hitherto-unexplored areas of American life are even more apparent
than "realism" in their work. "It has beauty, I'll not deny it," Sloan
wrote of one of his pictures which showed two young women in a
dingy gaslit room; "it must be that human life is beautiful."11

The realists, just as they preferred the excitement and sweat of
the streets to the refined atmosphere of the drawing room, also
liked to paint low life better than high. They were ready to admit
that human nature was much the same wherever found, and that
human beings were worth study and wonder at any social level, no
matter how exalted. In practice, however, they usually chose their
subjects from the poorer classes. They thought the poor were more
natural and genuine— in short, more human— than the rich. The reason
was not that poor folk were more virtuous or in any other funda-
mental sense different from wealthy people, but that they were, or
seemed to be, less bound by convention and appearances. Luks, for
example, maintained that prosperity was like a protective garment,
almost a disguise. He thought that under the pressure of hardship
men and women, whether they willed it or not, demonstrated their
true natures. In poverty character took on "edge"; people displayed
individuality in dress and conduct and cast caution and reserve aside.
The slum was an "art bonanza," for there was life in the raw, human
nature as undraped as models in the life class, and a multitude of
persons "as undefiled by good taste, etiquette or behaviour" as new-
born babes.12

This happy-go-lucky, indulgent attitude toward the slum and its
people was based in part on a superficial observation of the life of
the urban poor. It was not very realistic at all, for it overlooked hard
and sorrowful economic facts, ignored the many pressures for con-
formity that operated in the slums, and failed to recognize that
poverty more often distorted personality than allowed it free and
normal development. Yet there was more to these artistic expeditions
into poverty than a search for unconventional types. The painters

The Search for Truth 190

were looking for truth and sincerity, for men and women in whom
dignity of life was manifest. They might have addressed themselves
to individuals in any class. But where better could the human drama
be studied and understood than among the people who, because of
their poverty, were in constant touch with the vital, elemental prob-
lems of existence? Where else was the game played more intensely,
or for higher stakes? "Each day they matched their wits against
destiny," Jerome Myers said of the people of the East Side, whom
he painted for so many years. They were rewarding subjects because,
if they had gained nothing else, they possessed "a vast experience in
the adventure of life."13 On their faces and in their bodies both the
joy and travail of living were plainly disclosed.

Some of the ash-can painters, notably John Sloan, were active
members of the Socialist party, and most of them were to the left
of center in their political and economic views. Because of their
affiliation with radical causes and their attacks on the Academy, and
especially because they so often painted low life, observers sometimes
interpreted their work as social criticism. John Spargo found Luks's
"Little Gray Girl" "a perfect symphony of sorrow and mute
protest." Another enthusiast pronounced a Luks canvas "a terrible
indictment of our own cities in its pitiless truth to nature," and
declared that Myers' East Side studies showed the growing sympathy
for "the great crowds for whom there can be no hope under present
conditions."14

Although social criticism may be read into their pictures, it was
not in fact always intended as such by the artists. Sloan's characteri-
zation of his early paintings as "unconsciously social conscious"
applies fairly well to the work of the rest of the Henri group. They
were intent on painting the truth as they saw it, and when the truth
was unpleasant they did not hesitate to state the facts bluntly. But,
being men of good temper, they delineated the bright side of every-
day life quite as often as the dark. Furthermore, their very realism
made them more concerned with specific individuals and situations
than with generalizations about social conditions. Thus when Everett
Shinn chose "labor" as the theme of his most ambitious mural, he
treated the subject in a factual instead of an allegorical or proletarian
vein. He studied actual workers in a pottery and steel mill, came to
know the men and their jobs, and painted them at their tasks. The
only message his mural was intended to convey was admiration for

Art for Life's Sake 191

the skill and character of the men depicted and appreciation for the
value and seriousness of their labor.15

On occasion the realists purposely satirized the foibles of society.
For the most part, however, they were not protesting against injustice
in their paintings so much as affirming the artistic and human worth
of their subjects. For all the social content of their work, the men
remained artists rather than propagandists. Their aim was to produce
"human documents/ ' not tracts. Their greatest service was to disre-
gard the artificial standards of taste and propriety that had made art
"an orchid-like parasite" on life.16 In doing this they not only freed
American art from the iron grip of officialdom and the cloying
embrace of gentility, but also, by broadening the range of artistic
vision to include the lives and activities of the masses, restored
American art to its proper democratic course.

Social criticism, which, if present at all, was usually only implied
in the paintings of the ash-can school, was voiced explicitly in the
works of Eugene Higgins. Born in 1874, Higgins grew up in a suc-
cession of boardinghouses in dismal neighborhoods near the railroad
yards in St. Louis. According to his own account he was unfamiliar
with Daumier, who is often thought to have influenced him, until
after his own style had crystallized. It was Millet, first encountered
in reproductions printed in St. Nicholas Magazine, whom Higgins
admired and imitated when he began to sketch and paint. As an art
student in Paris at the turn of the century Higgins experienced the
privations of extreme poverty. Partly because circumstances made it
impossible for him to do otherwise he found his models among the
beggars and derelicts of the shadowy underworld of the city. His
pictures of social outcasts won some attention in Paris, and on his
return to the United States he continued to work in the same vein.
In 1907 he was discovered by Spargo, who described him as "a
Gorky in paint." Edwin Markham, a fellow admirer of Millet, hailed
Higgins as "the painter who gives us the pathos of the street and
hovel and morgue, as Millet gave us the pathos of the field."17

On the surface there was a good deal of similarity between the
work of Higgins and that of Jerome Myers. But where Myers was
content to reveal the distinctive character of the slums and slum
dwellers of Manhattan, Higgins attempted to depict the broader
theme of poverty itself. Moreover, there was a world of difference

the Search for truth 192

in the social attitudes of the two men. The kindly, warmhearted
Myers, accepting conditions as they were and taking hardship for
granted, described the slums as "habitations of a people . . . rich in
spirit and effort," and he seldom failed to discover attributes of
courage and dignity in his subjects.18 Higgins, on the contrary,
hated the economic forces that he believed debased the poor. When
asked what life in the slums was like he replied: "There is struggle
and strife, horrible suffering, livid agony of soul and body, want,
misery, and despair going on there in monotonous, killing repeti-
tion."19 Like Myers, Higgins was moved by "the patient suffering,
the long and stolid endurance, the enormous capacity for misery"
of the poor. Characteristically, however, he added: "How unjust it
all is! How terrible are the meek, the lowly! I never stop wondering
at these things and trying to express them."20

Higgins' art was didactic. His purpose was to expose the
hideousness of poverty and to show the tragic human wreckage it
left in its wake. The faceless people he drew were mere shadows of
broken lives. They were too sunk in shame and defeat to be able to
rise again; but he hoped that his pictures might shock society into
taking action to correct the conditions that produced such hopeless,
helpless shapes.

While painters such as Higgins and Myers were variously
expressing sympathy for the poor, the Swedish-born sculptor Charles
Haag was introducing a more militant kind of social protest into
American art. Haag, who came to the United States in 1903 at the
age of thirty-five, had been a factory worker in Europe, and he
regarded the class struggle as an established fact. Not the dignity of
toil, nor the need for charity, but the determination of labor to
rectify injustice through collective action was the theme of his work.
The workers he modeled were not hopeless and helpless except when
they meekly accepted their lot. They were brutish only when they
fought against each other like beasts. When they stood together,
united in purpose— as in "The Strike" or "Organized Labor"— they
were resolute and confident.

"Haag depicts labor in revolt," wrote Spargo approvingly.
"Almost all his work aims to be a protest against the degradation and
exploitation of the proletariat."21 That Haag's art should have been
highly recommended to labor and to socialists was not surprising.
What was more significant was that it was called to the attention

Art for Life's Sake 193

of social workers in the pages of their journal, Charities and the
Commons. Crystal Eastman, who shortly afterward conducted one
of the most important phases of the Pittsburgh survey, wrote in
1906 that there were two separate forces attacking social problems
in the United States. "One of these," she said, "seems to be reaching
down from a place of comparative safety to investigate, help and
prevent. . . . The other . . . seems to be blindly struggling up from
beneath, bound to break through and find the light." The forces
were social work and organized labor; and Miss Eastman believed
that Haag's sculpture might foster better understanding between
the two, because through study of Haag's pieces social workers
could gain knowledge of "the forceful idealism of the working-class
movement." Although his art was class-conscious, it was not, in her
opinion, socially disruptive in effect. Instead, it disclosed "the
nobility that comes to everyday men when they have for a time lost
sight of individual gain and are standing for some common good."22
Some of the drawings of the illustrator William Balfour Ker
were more propagandistic in intention and more revolutionary in
theme than Haag's statues. Much of Ker's work appeared in John
Ames Mitchell's Life, and the greater part of his contributions to
the magazine were sentimental fancies like "The Blind Leading the
Blind" (a blindfolded Cupid leading a pair of lovers down a twisting
path between gaping chasms) and "The Tattle Tale"— Cupid whis-
pering something in the ear of Dr. Stork. "The Hurry Call," one
of his most popular drawings, showed a doctor in a buggy racing
the stork down a country road. Ker frequently drew pictures of
the unfortunate children of the city for whom his editor felt such
strong sympathy. In "Wish I Was a Dog" a newsboy huddled in
the snow watched a rich woman carry her lapdog from a dress shop
to a waiting carriage; and in "Nothing Left" Santa sadly showed an
empty bag to two pathetic children in a miserable garret.23 Ker's
own views were more radical than these efforts would suggest. He
was a socialist, and he once confided to Art Young his determination
to prove that a painter could "use his brush like the splendid weapon
it is, and as hundreds have used their pens, for freedom and light. . . .
Socialism makes us think big things and long to do them whether

we can or not."24

Ker is best known for "From the Depths," a drawing he pre-
pared to illustrate Mitchell's novel The Silent War (1906). It pic-

The Search for Truth 194

tured the panic that broke out in a fashionable ballroom when one
of the oppressed toilers, whose task it was to support the structure
of luxury, revolted and succeeded in thrusting his fist through the
tiled floor. Life sold copies of the picture, advertised as suitable for
framing, at one dollar apiece. Socialists renamed it "The Hand of
Fate" and gave it wide publicity; and it has since been widely repro-
duced to document the social unrest of the Progressive era.25

In "King Canute," another illustration Ker drew for Mitchell,
a businessman seated in a thronelike chair on the ocean shore vainly
commanded the onrushing tide of humanity to halt. In the spume of
the wave Ker made faintly visible the faces and arms of the masses
who he believed were about to inundate the modern Canute and
his entourage of policemen, soldiers, politicians, and clergymen. Ker
expressed the same idea in different terms in his contribution to a
symposium on "The Message of Proletaire." Comparing the workers
to a sleeping giant "whom pygmies pillage as he sleeps," he warned
that the colossus was stirring and would soon be fully aroused. Then,
unless his rights were granted him, he would take them by force.
"The giant is clenching his teeth. He is snarling ominously, maddened
by the wrongs of the ages, and his snarl says 'Beware/ "26

Ker's friend Art Young was the most effective propagandist
for social reform among the artists. A fellow student of Henri at
the Academie Julian in Paris, Young was the first daily newspaper
cartoonist in the Midwest. In a career that extended from the 1880's
to the 1940's, during which he drew for The Saturday Evening Post
and the Hearst papers as well as for The Masses and a long list of
radical publications, Young traveled from the political right to the
left. He campaigned for Benjamin Harrison in 1892 and for Norman
Thomas in 1936; designed a cover for a tract upholding the convic-
tion of the Haymarket anarchists in the eighties, and defended
Sacco and Vanzetti in New Masses cartoons in the twenties; sup-
ported the Spanish- American War in 1898 and was indicted and
tried under the Espionage Act twenty years later for alleged com-
plicity in a "conspiracy to obstruct the recruitment and enlistment
service of the United States."

The range of Young's work was as broad as his period of activity
was long. He was equally at home in social satire, political commen-
tary, nostalgic reminiscence of small-town life, allegory, and fantasy.
One of his favorite themes was hell. Gustave Dore had been the idol

Art for Life's Sake 195

of his youth, and Young continued the Frenchman's explorations of
the nether regions in his own fashion in several books and magazine
series. "Having Their Fling," the antiwar cartoon that incensed the
Department of Justice in 1917, displayed capitalist, editor, politician,
and preacher cavorting to the music of a satanic orchestra. Poverty
occupied Young's attention no less often than hell. Perhaps this, too,
was the result of Dore's influence, for Dore had pictured the con-
temporary hell of London slums as well as the remoter one of
Dante's Inferno. Young himself was of the opinion that his political
cartoons represented his best work, but he prided himself that he
had not wasted time on "the trivial turns in current politics." His
text, he said, was "the one important issue of this era the world over:
Plutocracy versus the principles of Socialism. . . ."27

Young's militancy made him impatient with less propagandistic
artists, including other socialists such as Sloan, whom he accused
(during a squabble over the artistic policies of The Masses) of
wanting "to run pictures of ash cans and girls hitching up their
skirts . . . —regardless of ideas and without title."28 In Young's work
the idea was all-important and the title or caption was often essential
to make the point of the drawing clear. Some of his works, such as
the famous cartoon in which a woman told her husband that he had
no right to complain of being tired when he had worked all day in
"a nice cool sewer"— while she had been slaving over a hot stove-
were illustrated jokes. Others, such as the picture showing two slum
children admiring the night sky, with one observing that the stars
were "thick as bedbugs," might have stood alone as drawings, but
they took on added meaning as a result of the captions.29 As his
message became more radical, Young sometimes had to change his
captions. Once he made the mistake of labeling a top-hatted villain
in a drawing for Hearst's Sunday American "capitalism." "We can't
do that," the editor, Arthur Brisbane, told him. "Call him Greed.
That means the same thing and it won't get us into trouble."30

Young was a formidable social critic because he combined a
strong comic sense with a deep strain of moral earnestness. Most of
his shafts were directed at hypocrisy. He attacked self -righteousness
wherever he found it, whether in individuals, institutions, or society.
"Holy Trinity" (1908) showed a clergyman conducting a service in
a beautiful church supported by tenements on Squalor Street, Bac-
teria Court, Thug Corner, Tuberculosis Alley, and Filth Lane. In

The Search for Truth 196

"American Mothers" (1909) he reproduced a picture of a society
matron and her children such as might have adorned the cover of
Town and Country; beside it he placed a view of a tenement home
where the mother ironed, one daughter washed clothes, another
cared for the baby, and a little boy, too young to work and too old
to be tended, stood forlorn and neglected. "Poverty develops char-
acter," asserted a pompous businessman in another drawing; an
impertinent youth replied: "Then, of course, you will bring up
your children in poverty." "Pigs and Children" compared the advice
given in a Department of Agriculture bulletin to allow piglets
sunshine, fresh air, and space to run and play, with living conditions
in the slums and working conditions in factories employing child
labor.31

There was humor of a sort in nearly all of Young's work, but
usually it was better calculated to make men wince than laugh. His
aim was to indict, not to amuse. In his opinion the prime requirement
of an artist was altruism. "An artist is one who can put himself in
another's place," he wrote toward the end of his long career. "The
better the artist the more intensely he feels. He is sympathetic and
imaginative to a degree that makes him 'queer' to the world of
'normal' human beings. Seeing others in despair is his own despair."32

Like Young, the photographer Lewis W. Hine enlisted his talent
in the service of reform. He had been trained as a sociologist and was
teaching at the Ethical Culture School in New York when he took
up photography. His original purpose was to gather illustrative
material for use in the classroom, and, although he soon made camera
work his full-time occupation, he never ceased to regard himself as
primarily a social investigator. Hine first attracted attention in 1906
when he collaborated with Charles Weller in photographing alley
dwellings and their occupants for the Charities and the Commons
special issue on Washington, D. C.33 He was a member of the
Pittsburgh survey staff, contributing to the report of the survey a
portfolio of pictorial documents of industrial life. Around 1908 he
began a lengthy investigation of child labor for the National Child
Labor Committee. In carrying out this project he sometimes found
it necessary to smuggle his bulky camera into hostile factories, "steal"
his pictures, and take notes with his writing hand concealed in his
pocket.34 Subsequently he prepared a photographic study of tenement
homework for the New York State Factory Investigating Commis-
sion and took pictures of the children of New York's West Side

Art for Life's Sake 197

slums for the Russell Sage Foundation inquiry, Boyhood and Law-
lessness (1914).

Hine persevered in his photographic investigations through good
times and bad, mainly the latter as far as his personal fortunes were
concerned, until his death in 1940. His pictures recorded vital aspects
of changing social conditions in the United States from before the
panic of 1907 until near the close of the New Deal. Through them
it is possible to follow immigrants from their arrival at Ellis Island
to the homes and jobs they eventually found or made for themselves
in America. His photographs show the circumstances in which
2,000,000 American children at the start of the century labored in
textile mills, coal mines, glass factories, canneries, in their homes, and
on the streets. Hine's camera revealed the arduousness of the twelve-
hour day in the steel mills and the dangers to which men, women,
and children were casually subjected in their work. He provided
graphic evidence that was used effectively by social workers and
humanitarian reformers in their attempts to awaken the public to
the incongruous contrast between ostentatious wealth and desperate
poverty in democratic America. Charles Edward Russell called Hine's
child-labor photographs "witnesses against ourselves"; for they
exhibited faces and bodies that testified to the ugly towns, squalid
houses, unwholesome meals, monotonous tasks, and vicious recrea-
tions that made up many of the children's whole existence.35 But
Hine also chronicled the gradual improvement of conditions in many
areas, as, for example, the change for the better accomplished at
Ellis Island between 1905 and 1926; and his camera recorded the
progress made by and as a result of the activities of public and
private welfare agencies.

Unlike his contemporary, Alfred Stieglitz, Hine was not a
conscious artist. Although very much aware of the color and pathos
of the material he photographed, he was more interested in human
lives than in problems of design. He seems to have given little
thought to art other than to do his best to make accurate and
convincing renderings of matters that deeply moved him. Perhaps
it was because art was to him subordinate to social justice that he
was so often able to create images of life that were at once truthful,
appealing, and challenging.

Charles Caffin's observation, made in 1913, that "the artistic
expression of a people varies according as its ideals incline to the

The Search for Truth 198

aristocratic or democratic" may not have universal validity, but it
does have some pertinence to artistic developments in the United
States in the early twentieth century. Art for life's sake was both a
product and a manifestation of what Henri called "the great fresh
ideas" that coursed through the United States in the Progressive
era.36 It was not just by accident that the revival of realism and the
emergence of social protest in art coincided with the appearance of
similar movements in literature, with the development of factualism
in social science, and with efforts to achieve a better realization of
democracy in American political and economic life. The fascination
the poor exercised over the artists mirrored the national concern
with the problem of poverty; the artists' preoccupation with the
lower classes reflected the interest displayed in other fields in the way
the masses lived and died, did their work, and sought their pleasure.
"Society is in ferment with new Hope," rejoiced CafEn. The hope
was in the possibility of guaranteeing "the right of all to a chance
of fair and wholesome living, both spiritual and material."37 The
artists expressed in graphic terms the democratic spirit that produced
the hope and ferment of the age: belief in the primacy of human
values, founded in respect and consideration for all men regardless
of station in life.

Part Three

SOCIAL
STRIVING,

c. 1897-1925

12. The Home and the Child

13. Women's Hours and Wages

14. The Common Welfare
The Trice of Reform
A Note on the Sources
Notes
Bibliography

A Note on the Role of Social Workers
in the Reform Movement

Toward the end of the 1890,s the United States entered an era
which, in retrospect, appears to have been one of the most fruitful
epochs in American history. The two decades preceding our entry
into World War I were relatively, although not uninterruptedly,
prosperous. They were happy years, not because sore spots in the
nation's economic and political structure were either absent or
ignored, but because there was abounding confidence that old evils
could be eradicated and a more wholesome society achieved. The
atmosphere was charged with unrest, but it was vigorous discontent
rather than despair or cynicism that characterized the times. Seldom
in American experience have criticism and confidence, protest and
affirmation, coalesced more completely. Out of their mingling
emerged an attitude of aggressive optimism that was uniquely favor-
able to constructive social endeavor.

The most audacious belief of the age was in the possibility of
abolishing poverty. The social causes of misery were to be discovered
and rooted out; the personal causes were to be dealt with by provid-
ing an environment less likely to drive men and women into vicious
habits and more conducive to the development of good character.
All of the more fundamental reform movements of the Progressive
era were dedicated to these ends. Campaigns for better housing,
public health, stricter child-labor and compulsory-education laws,
more adequate protection for employed women, compensation for
work accidents, more stringent regulation of the liquor trade, and a
host of other measures were all parts of a broad attack on the problem
of poverty.

For all the enthusiasm with which the fight was waged the
ultimate goal of the abolition of want was not yet attained. But to
have begun the struggle was itself a major achievement, and the
immediate results, the elimination of specific abuses and the securing
of long-overdue reforms in industry and government, were not

201

Social Striving 202

inconsiderable. These early victories have served as precedents and
have provided the inspiration for all our later conscious efforts to
obtain a fuller measure of economic security.

The initial impulse for the battle against poverty came from
the new profession of social work. Labor unions, women's clubs,
religious and academic organizations, and various civic associations
all made vitally important contributions to the reform movement,
but none of these groups was more consistently active in promoting
action for community betterment than the social workers. Their
daily tasks brought them into frequent and regular contact with
the less fortunate members of society; their major occupation was
to ascertain and to relieve need; all their activities were directly
related to human welfare. If charity agents and settlement residents
regularly took their places in the vanguard of reform it was less
because of any theoretical radicalism on their part than because they
were better informed about the actual situation of the poor and more
keenly aware than others of the necessity for improving social
conditions.

Perhaps the chief accomplishment of men and women such as
Edward T. Devine, Robert Hunter, Mrs. Josephine Shaw Lowell,
and Miss Jane Addams was to communicate to workers in other
fields, and in no small degree to the public as a whole, a sense
of the great need and the vast opportunities for humanitarian
service. Teaching had long been recognized as the central tendency
of philanthropy. The "friendly visitors" of the early charitable
associations had sought to uplift the poor by instructing them
in the ways of temperance and frugality. Subsequently the charity
organization movement had attempted to educate the well-to-do
away from indiscriminate almsgiving and toward more scientific
philanthropic practices. In the morning years of the twentieth
century many social workers, without giving up their interest in
developing better methods of charity, became propagandists of higher
living standards and crusaders for social justice. They ceased to be
exclusively preceptors of the poor and advisers of the rich and
became, instead, teachers of a more wholesome way of life to the
entire community.

The fact that social workers so often took the lead in reform
movements helps to explain the pragmatic character of prewar
liberalism. The aims of their profession, well expressed in a slogan

A Note on the Role of Social Workers in the Reform Movement 203

carried on the cover of a philanthropic journal, "Charity today may
be justice tomorrow," were visionary enough; but its methods were
neither Utopian nor radical. By temperament and experience case
workers and settlement residents were convinced that persuasion
and education were the most effective methods of obtaining improve-
ment. Their everyday job was to bridge the chasm between rich and
poor, and in their labors for reform they tended to emphasize the
harmony rather than the conflict of class interests.

Individual social workers represented many different shades of
opinion, including socialism. In their professional capacity, however,
they were practicing humanitarians, not doctrinaire advocates of
any particular economic system. Hence they made their appeal to
altruism rather than to ideology. Generally speaking, they were
content with piecemeal progress. It was typical of their attitude to
regard "the greatest good of the greatest number" as too vague an
ideal to serve as a program of action. Their approach was just the
opposite. Abolish the misery of the most miserable, they counseled,
and repeat the process as long as want and suffering persist.

CHAPTER 12

The Home and the Child

It takes a lot of telling to make a city know when it is doing wrong.
However, that was what I was there for. When it didn't seem to help,
I would go and look at a stonecutter hammering away at his rock
perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it.
Yet at the hundred and first blow it would split in two, and I knew
it was not that blow that did it, but all that had gone before. . . .

Jacob A. Rns, The Making of an American.

Tenement-House Reform

THE movement for tenement-house reform was the first major
venture in social amelioration in the United States in the twen-
tieth century and the one that, in the long run, was destined to
be the most instructive. By the turn of the century the influence of
the settlements and the frequent exploitation of slum scenes and
personalities in literature had begun to affect popular attitudes toward
tenement dwellers. The older loathing for the people of the slums
began to give way to sympathy and even respect. They were less
often lumped with the vicious and criminal classes and more fre-
quently considered particularly unfortunate members of the working
class. It became something of a commonplace to remark that they
were obliged to pay high rents for accommodations that compared
unfavorably with the stables of beasts. "You are liable to arrest if
you allow your stable to become filthy and a nuisance," commented
a writer in Scribner's Magazine. "The landlord may do pretty much
what he pleases with his tenements."1

If opinion regarding the residents of the tenements was mellow-

204

The Home and the Child 56$

ing, criticism of the tenements themselves was becoming sharper
than ever before. There was general agreement that the tenement
house was the nexus of all the evils associated with the slum. In an
appeal for funds to finance the famous tenement-house exhibition of
1900 the New York C.O.S. argued that the crime, pauperism, disease,
and intemperance of urban communities were directly traceable to
the deplorable environment created by the tenements.2 Ernest Poole's
pamphlet The Plague in Its Stronghold (1903), written while the
author was a resident of the University Settlement, recounted story
after story of the largely preventable and unnecessary suffering
caused by tuberculosis in the slums and exposed conditions in tene-
ment houses— such as a so-called air shaft six feet long, twelve inches
wide, and six stories deep— that contributed to the spread of the
disease.3 At the suggestion of Maud Nathan of the Consumers' League,
Theodore Roosevelt admonished an audience gathered to celebrate
the opening of a charity rest home for tubercular patients that
eliminating tenement sweatshops would be a more effective method
of dealing with the problem.4 Even more pointedly, in 1907, Charles
Edward Russell warned the readers of a muckraking magazine that
cities could not sow slums without reaping epidemics, that society
could not allow masses of people to dwell in cellars and attics without
breeding national weakness, and that someday there would have to
be "an accounting for every rotten tenement, every foul alley, every
reeking court, every life without light."5

In accordance with the established pattern of liberal reform,
investigation of existing conditions was the initial step in the campaign
against the tenements. "Light is a very effective moral disinfectant,"
declared Charles R. Henderson of the University of Chicago. "Infor-
mation about abuses is often the only remedy that is required."6
Henderson's view was shared by several generations of American
students. For years they occupied themselves in compiling an impres-
sive store of data on the housing of the poor. The facts were laid
before the public by the popular writings and illustrated lectures of
Jacob Riis, by intrepid clubwomen such as Albion Fellows Bacon of
Indiana, by publications of the federal Commissioner of Labor, by
numerous state investigating commissions, and by surveys undertaken
by charitable societies, settlement houses, research foundations, and
schools of social work.7 The facts were that, as of about 1917, roughly
one third of the people of the United States lived in houses that were

Social Strioing 206

bad by any standard, and approximately one tenth of them occupied
dwellings that constituted an acute menace to health, morals, and
family life.8

Despite the expectations of some reformers, the tenement did
not disappear even after its evils had become a matter of common
knowledge. For all the light thrown upon it, the housing problem
remained "almost as immovable as the Sphinx."9 One housing report
was much like another in that whatever city was surveyed the same
conditions were found to prevail— overcrowded lots and overoccupied
rooms, dark rooms, no running water, no toilets, excessive fire risk,
and miserable "apartments" in basements and cellars.10 Edith Abbott,
a colleague of Henderson at the University of Chicago and one of
the most experienced housing investigators in the nation, eventually
came to the conclusion that the repeated tenement surveys conducted
in Chicago provided "only further demonstrations of the futility of
such investigations."11

Not popular indifference, not even the bitter-end hostility dis-
played over the years by landlords and groups associated with them
entirely explain the slow progress of tenement reform. The average
citizen was honestly perplexed by the magnitude and complexity of
the problem. "He trim' up bote hands!" exclaimed an interested
East Side observer in describing the behavior of Richard Watson
Gilder when that dignitary toured the sweatshops of Ludlow Street
in connection with his duties as chairman of the New York Tene-
ment House Committee of 1894.12 Society, too, figuratively threw
up both hands when confronted by the sordid spectacle of the
slums. It was, after all, one thing to recognize and demand the
elimination of bad housing and quite another to accomplish the
task by democratic means in a capitalistic economy.

A frequently proposed and occasionally implemented remedy
for the housing problem was the erection of model tenements by
limited-dividend corporations. The plan appealed to many moderate
reformers because it avoided governmental compulsion and seemed
to provide a voluntary and almost automatic method of improvement.
Not only would the model dwellings make larger and better accom-
modations available at low cost to a portion of the poor, but, it was
assumed, they would also set a standard that other landlords would

The Home and the Child 207

have to meet, either because of the pressure of public opinion or
through the operation of the law of competition.

Beginning in the 1850's, in greater numbers after the 1870's,
and still more frequently after 1900, model tenements were built in
New York, Brooklyn, Boston, Washington, Philadelphia, Baltimore,
and Cincinnati. The earliest of these, the "Big Flat," erected by the
New York Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor in
1855, proved to be a model of the worst type of housing.13 Had it
not been for the more successful experiments of Alfred T. White of
Brooklyn during the seventies and eighties advocates of the model-
tenement idea might have been permanently discouraged. White's
work, however, seemed to demonstrate the feasibility of "philan-
thropy plus 5 per cent"— decent working-class homes yielding inves-
tors a modest return on their capital.14 In 1896 the A.I.C.P. helped
organize the City and Suburban Homes Association, capitalized at
$1,000,000, which was the largest builder of model tenements in the
United States. The president of the Association was E. R. L. Gould,
author of The Housing of the Working People (1895). In the prewar
years he and General George M. Sternberg of Washington, D. C,
former Surgeon General of the United States, were the leading
American proponents of limited- dividend housing; and the compara-
tive success of the enterprises they headed awakened enthusiasm and
emulation in many parts of the country.15

Closely related to the model-tenement movement was the sug-
gestion that better management of rental properties would produce
improvement in slum conditions. Resident directors were installed
in a few of the model dwellings, and, following the example of
Octavia Hill of London, a few American landlords either took up
residence in the tenements they owned or personally collected rent
from their tenants.16 Henderson waxed enthusiastic about the good
works performed by the "landlord missionaries"; by combining
business with philanthropy, they "transformed the houses and the
people at the same time." A quite different opinion was expressed
several years later by the dramatist Charles Kenyon, who, in Kindling
(1911), pilloried a landlady bountiful for her presumption and
hypocrisy.17

In its best expression, however, improved management was less
an attempt to uplift tenants than to reform landlords. Robert Hunter

Social Strioing 208

asserted that the few followers of Octavia Hill had exposed the
indifference of the majority of tenement owners and shown that the
worst abuses in slum dwellings were by no means entirely the fault
of the tenants.18 A signally successful application of the idea began
in 1909 when the Trinity Corporation, whose tenement properties
in lower Manhattan had long been notorious, experienced a belated
conversion to higher standards of management. The wealthy church
had previously fought the efforts of housing reformers and had once
succeeded in delaying for eight years the enforcement of a regulation
requiring the installation of running water on each story of a tene-
ment house. Repeated criticism, especially the savage pictorial and
editorial attacks of Art Young and Charles Edward Russell, at length
proved too much for even this citadel of self -righteousness to with-
stand. The Trinity Corporation employed the secretary of the
tenement-house committee of the New York C.O.S. as supervisor
of its houses and embarked on a new career as a model landlord.19
Neither the building of model tenements nor the labors of "land-
lord missionaries' ' brought about a general improvement in urban
housing standards. Types of buildings that were known to be unsatis-
factory in every respect continued to be erected; old ones in advanced
stages of decrepitude remained profitably rented, often more profit-
ably than those kept in good repair. A few model houses, returning
5 or 6 per cent on the capital invested, offered no serious competition
to the more numerous bad and neglected ones that earned higher
dividends. Nor did good example or the pressure of public opinion
exert much influence on the impersonal "estates" that held so many
of the dwellings of the poor in mortmain. Nowhere did the number
of model dwellings even begin to meet the need, and not infrequently
the higher costs of building and operating them necessitated the
charging of rentals that put them out of the reach of the poor.20

Long before the end of the nineteenth century the failure of
voluntary methods of reform led states and municipalities to enact
building and sanitary codes regulating the construction and main-
tenance of tenement houses. These pioneer interferences with private
enterprise were seldom stringent. They imposed only minimum
standards, avoided precise specifications, distributed administrative
authority among several different boards or departments, and in effect
permitted enforcement agencies to nullify the laws by exemptions

The Home and the Child 209

from the code requirements.21 The laws were gradually strengthened,
so that by the late nineties New York, Boston, and Chicago had
secured authority to seize and demolish dangerous tenements. Never-
theless, flagrant violations were common, because inspectors, where
present at all, were very few. Enforcement would have been still
weaker had not the omnipresent charity agents supplemented the
work of the official inspectors, reported instances of evasions of the
laws, and prodded civic authorities into taking action against some
of the violations.22

Substantial improvements in the housing laws were made
around 1900 when both New York and Chicago, following thorough
and well-publicized investigations, obtained more stringent legislation.
The New York Tenement House Law of 1901, one of the proudest
achievements of the C.O.S., was the earlier and the more influential
of the two measures. It established higher standards than had formerly
prevailed for new construction, required alterations and improve-
ments in existing structures, and provided for inspection of all dwell-
ings housing three or more families. By amendment to the city
charter, responsibility for enforcement was centralized in a new
tenement-house department. The C.O.S. committee, through whose
efforts the law of 1901 had been adopted, fought later efforts to
weaken it, lobbied for new legislation to strengthen weak spots in
the code, and worked unremittingly for an honest administration
of the measure. In somewhat similar fashion the Hull House group
and the School of Social Service of the University of Chicago sought
to safeguard, extend, and translate into reality the legal gains recorded
in Chicago's ordinance of 1902.23

In the next decade and a half eleven states and more than forty
cities enacted new tenement-house codes or revised existing building
and sanitary regulations. Nearly every one of these measures was
patterned either after the New York statute, whose principal author
was Lawrence Veiller, or after a later model law also drafted by
Veiller.24 At the time the passage of these laws was hailed as a
great victory for reform. Events were soon to prove, however, that
the battle had only begun. Opponents secured the repeal or modifica-
tion of some of the new codes; others were declared unconstitutional
by the courts; appropriations for administering them were usually
meager, and the number of inspectors was seldom adequate. Friends
of reform were not always in control of city governments. When

Social Striving 210

they were, commercial housing interests displayed the wiliest in-
genuity in evading regulation; when they were not, city authorities
made no genuine effort to enforce the codes.

In New York, where, with the exception of one brief period,
the administration of the laws was more effective than elsewhere
in the nation, owners of "old law" tenements converted their prop-
erties into lodginghouses to escape the necessity of conforming with
the higher standards imposed on tenement houses. In Chicago, more
than thirty years after the passage of the ordinance of 1902, investi-
gators found that numerous provisions of the statute were still being
flouted.25 Similar evasions or violations of local building and sanitary
codes persisted in every large city in which the demand for houses
was greater than the supply.

Enforcement was the nub of the problem, but not simply
because civic authorities deemed it bad politics to insist that landlords
make expensive structural changes in tenements. Very frequently
officials were humanely reluctant to order poor families to vacate
miserable homes when there were no better ones available at prices
they could afford to pay.26 The degree of enforcement, in other
words, was necessarily conditioned by the fact that although regula-
tory legislation might "outlaw" bad houses it did not provide good

ones.27

To say that such amelioration of slum conditions as was effected
in the first third of the twentieth century came primarily as an
incidental result of the general progress of invention, the substitution
of automobiles for horse-drawn vehicles, and the curtailment of
immigration, is not to disparage the tenement-house laws.28 They
were needed, and a stricter enforcement of them would have been
desirable. At best, however, they were negative remedies. Although
it was not recognized until later, the major contribution of the
prewar years toward the solution of the tenement evil was to demon-
strate the inefficacy of traditional methods of dealing with the prob-
lem. Fundamental improvement awaited the adoption of more positive
programs of action.

In the middle of the nineteenth century Theodore Parker had
suggested that if capitalists neglected their responsibilities, municipali-
ties should undertake to provide adequate and cheap homes for the
poor.29 Forty years later, in the course of "An East Side Ramble,"

The Home and the Child 211

William Dean Howells mused that as long as housing was left to
private interests "the very poorest must always be housed as they
are now." Cannily avoiding too specific a statement, Howells averred
that "nothing but public control in some form or other" could
secure for the poor shelters fit for human beings.30 Similar expressions
of opinion were not uncommon around the turn of the century, and
pictures of municipally owned workingmen's homes in European
cities were displayed at the New York tenement-house exhibit of
1900. Tentative interest in extending public ownership into the field
of housing was temporarily suppressed, however, by the hostile
pronouncements against it in De Forest and Veiller's influential and
authoritative volumes on The Tenement House Problem (1903)
and in Veiller's subsequent writings.31

Veiller's animosity toward municipal housing arose mainly from
suspicion of the honesty and competency of public officials. In view
of this attitude his strong advocacy of public regulation was not
entirely logical; but, like many of his contemporaries, he deemed
regulation the sensible middle ground between the dangerous extremes
of laissez faire and socialism. In spite of this widely shared opinion,
evidence of the failure of regulatory legislation to solve the housing
problem mounted. In 1913 an official commission advised the Massa-
chusetts legislature that "In no country has private enterprise been
equal to the task of properly housing the inhabitants. In nearly every
country of standing among the civilized nations the government has
actively aided and encouraged the creation of a larger supply of good
homes."32 The next year a bulletin issued by the United States
Bureau of Labor Statistics affirmed that a satisfactory housing pro-
gram required "systematic Government regulation, encouragement,
and financial aid."33

Organized labor, representing the portion of the population that
suffered the most from bad housing, was the first sizable group to
advocate government subsidies for housing. Delegates to the national
convention of the A.F.L. in 1914 adopted a resolution calling on
the federal government to make loans for financing municipal and
private ownership of "sanitary homes."34 In the following year the
voters of Massachusetts ratified a constitutional amendment, backed
by organized labor, that authorized the Commonwealth to build and
sell low-cost homes.35

With the exception of the emergency projects erected by the

Social Strioing 212

federal government during World War I, little progress in public
housing was made until the 1930's. By then several decades of research
had made it clear that bad housing was above all else a consequence
of low wages. Until the wage structure was fundamentally altered
the only alternative to permitting large numbers of the poorly paid
to dwell in houses dangerous to their own and the community's
welfare appeared to be the adoption of a permanent housing subsidy
paid from public funds.

Recognition of the absolute necessity of publicly financed
housing programs was made easier by depression conditions. The
conclusion was by no means the inspiration of the moment, however,
and it had not been arrived at easily or quickly. Its acceptance was
a response to fact, not a triumph of theory. Public housing was
adopted because successive generations of informed, public-spirited
citizens who had been wrestling with the problem in dead earnest
for the better part of a century had been unable to find any other
solution that worked.

The Crusade Against Child Labor

Much of the history of philanthropy and social reform can be
written in terms of efforts to rescue the children of the poor from
the bad consequences of their poverty. In a sense the long agitation
for improved housing and the elimination of the slum was part of,
and a continuation of, the "child saving" movement of the nineteenth
century. Sunday schools, missions in the slums, denominational
orphan homes, children's aid societies, and neighborhood settlements
were all attempts to deal with the problem of neglected and poten-
tially wayward children. Like the campaigns to take youthful paupers
out of the almshouses, to establish reformatories for juvenile offenders,
and to create a system of public education, tenement-house reform
was intended to obtain better surroundings and opportunities for the
offspring of poor families.86

Reasons for the continuing interest in the children of the poor

The Home and the Child 213

are not hard to discover. Being more numerous than adults, especially
in an era when large families were the rule, children formed the
largest group in the ranks of poverty.37 Their sufferings were the
most grievous and their own responsibility for their condition the
least apparent. Of all the poor they were the most deserving of
sympathy and the most entitled to generous assistance. Moreover, an
improvement in their lot was essential to society. In 1854 Charles
Loring Brace had warned his generation to beware the day when
"the outcast, vicious, reckless multitude of New York boys, swarm-
ing now in every foul alley and low street, come to know their power
and use it/"** Half a century later, and with working rather than
idle children in mind, Edwin Markham called attention to "the
terrible truth that drudgery yoked with misery always begets a
degraded and degrading humanity."39

Such warnings carried unusual weight in the prewar years; for
the renewed faith in democracy that characterized the Progressive
era placed a premium on the development of good citizenship. The
goals of progressivism, a larger degree of popular control over gov-
ernment, and the conferring of greater regulatory authority on the
agencies of government had value only if future generations possessed
the strength of mind and character to assume the burdens of demo-
cratic rule.40

As in the past, child saving took many different forms. Bills
seeking to curtail infant mortality through improved milk supplies,
organizing juvenile court and probation systems, establishing small
parks, playgrounds, and public baths, authorizing mothers' pensions,
and imposing a longer period of compulsory school attendance
crowded the calendars of state legislatures and city councils. The
most typical expression of the early twentieth-century interest in
child welfare, however, was the crusade against child labor. It was
in this struggle that the progressive reformers scored some of their
most notable victories; it was in this field, also, that they experienced
their most humiliating defeat.

Opinion regarding child labor shifted with changing attitudes
toward poverty. As long as poverty itself was regarded as either a
blessing in disguise or an unfortunate but inevitable necessity, the
employment of boys and girls at gainful occupations in industry or

Social Striving 214

trade was countenanced and sometimes defended as a positive good.
But with the coming of the new view of poverty child labor seemed
absurd and reprehensible.

The main lines of theoretical attack on child labor were that
it was not necessary, that it was harmful to the child, and that to
permit it to exist was contrary to the best interests of the community.
To the argument that it was essential for children of the poor to
earn money to help support their families, reformers replied that the
burden of financial responsibility should not be thrust upon the
shoulders of youth. They accused some parents of undue dependence
on the labor of offspring, charging that all too often children were
put to work in order that adults might enjoy idleness. In any event,
the reformers contended, it would not be necessary for boys and
girls to seek employment at an early age if the natural wage earner,
the father, were paid a living wage. They suspected, and in various
studies proved, that the number of poor widows supported by the
pittances earned by their sons or daughters was much smaller than
was popularly supposed. In those comparatively few instances in
which widows actually were dependent on the wages of young
children, the reformers suggested that either the state or private
philanthropy should relieve the children of the task of supporting
the family.41

In The Bitter Cry of the Children (1906) John Spargo estimated
the number of working children in the United States at two and a
quarter million; he alleged that they were employed mainly because
it was cheaper to use them than to hire adults or install machinery.
"Such child labor," Spargo declared, "has no other objective than
the increase of employers' profits; it has nothing to do with training
the child for the work of life."42 S. W. Woodward, a prominent
Washington merchant, wrote from a more conservative point of
view than Spargo, but he also emphasized that employment at too
early an age blighted a child's economic prospects: "It may be stated
as a safe proposition that for every dollar earned by a child under
fourteen years of age tenfold will be taken from its earning capacity
in later years."43 The child laborers of today will be the paupers of
tomorrow, predicted Jane Addams; they are the boys and girls who
will grow up without either formal schooling or knowledge of a
trade; sooner or later, their youthful energies exhausted, they will
become dull, shiftless drifters.44

The Home and the Child 215

Ernest Poole presented facts and figures to disprove the cherished
legend that newsboys were plucky "little merchants" learning the
lessons of industry and enterprise in the spine-stiffening school of
hard knocks. His research indicated that street work not only failed
to provide useful training for later trade or business, but that it also
bred habits of irregularity and restlessness that were positive handi-
caps to steady employment in manhood. He found that such of its
graduates as did not grow up to be unskilled and low-paid laborers
more often became pimps, gamblers, petty thieves, and professional
toughs than successful citizens.45 Poole's view of the matter was
endorsed by Charles P. Neill, United States Commissioner of Labor,
who branded newspaper selling as "a training in either knavery or
mendicancy." Nowhere else, he said, was "the unfortunate lesson so
early learned that dishonesty and trickery are more profitable than
honesty, and that sympathy coins more pennies than does industry."46

Robert Hunter told of a confirmed vagrant who explained and
excused his refusal to work on the ground that day after day, year
in and year out, all through his youth he had been compelled to
repeat one simple operation in a textile mill. "I done that," the tramp
said, making a motion with one hand, "for sixteen years." The moral
Hunter drew from this and similar tales was

You cannot rob children of their play, any more than you can for-
get and neglect the children at their play, as we now do in the
tenement district, without at some time paying the penalty. When
children are robbed of playtime, they too often reassert their right
to it in manhood, as vagabonds, criminals, and prostitutes.47

The reformers' argument was thus not compounded entirely^ of
sentiment. The leaders of the movement were concerned with the
bad economic and social consequences of child labor as well as with
its present inhumanity. They pointed to its effect on wages: men
received less than a living wage because it was expected that their
wives and children would also work; the women and children re-
ceived even less than the men because it was not expected that they
would be self-supporting; and meanwhile the presence of children
in the labor market depressed the wages of adults who were forced
to compete with them for jobs.48

Taking advantage of the waxing enthusiasm for conservation
of natural resources, critics of child labor pointed out that careless,

Social Striving 216

unregulated exploitation could exhaust the nation's working force
as readily and as irreparably as its timber and mineral reserves.49
Child labor "robs the assets of the community," said Miss Addams;
"it uses up those resources which should have kept industry going
on for many years."50 If for no other reason than hardheaded
national self-interest the children must be saved. The shortsighted
and extravagant economic practice of child slavery must be brought
under control.

Fundamentally, however, the reformers' outlook was ethical
rather than coldly economic. Again and again they returned to the
humanitarian aspects of the problem. John Spargo cried out in horror:
"This great nation in its commercial madness devours its babes."51
Felix Adler observed that superstition once decreed the sacrifice of
a child's life to insure that a temple, a city wall, or a bridge should
stand. "We must not return to those ancient barbarisms," he admon-
ished. "We must not allow this new frenzy, this obsession, this mania
of money-making at any cost to lead us into similar frightful aberra-
tions."52 Less rhetorically, but with the quiet conviction that often
made it seem as though the conscience of the nation spoke through
her voice, Jane Addams summed up the case against child labor:
". . . it confuses our sense of value, so that we come to think that a
bolt of cheap cotton is more to be prized than a child properly
nourished, educated, and prepared to take his place in life."53

By 1900 the dangers inherent in unregulated child labor had
become so well recognized that twenty-eight states had adopted
some, but by no means adequate, legal protection for working
children. Among the states that had not yet done so were North
Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, and Alabama. These four states,
although not unique in their dereliction, had a more serious child-
labor problem than the other commonwealths that had failed to
enact legislation on the subject. They were the principal centers of
cotton-textile manufacturing in the South; and for more than a
century that industry had been notorious wherever it flourished as
a user and abuser of boys and girls.

During the 1890's the number of children employed in Southern
mills increased more than 160 per cent; persons under sixteen years
of age, many of them much younger, comprised nearly 30 per cent
of the labor force of the mills. In the absence of either statutory

The Home and the Child 217

restraints or effective employee organizations they were worked such
hours by day or night and paid such wages as were consistent with
the impersonal demands of profit. The harshness of this arbitrary
taskmaster was sometimes mitigated, but also occasionally aggravated,
by the paternalistic management of the textile enterprises.

The situation in the South was complicated by the underlying
poverty of the region. No matter how deplorable conditions in the
mills and mill villages might appear to be, they could always be
defended as superior to the misery prevailing in the wretched hills
and barrens whence the children came. Local opinion tended to
regard rapid industrialization, at whatever human cost and regardless
of the limited enjoyment of its immediate benefits, as essential to
the welfare of the South. So the clarion call for cheap labor, blown
on factory whistles, rang through the Piedmont, and a "gaunt goblin
army" of children answered the summons to duty. The interrupted
advance of the Great South was resumed on a new front with
"pygmy people sucked in from the hills" marching in the front
ranks.54

One of the Southern textile states, Alabama, had once passed a
statute fixing a minimum age for factory employment, but repealed
it in the 1890's. In 1901, however, child-labor bills backed by the
state federations of labor, supported by important political figures,
and endorsed by newspaper editorials were introduced in the legisla-
tures of all four of the leading textile states. The foremost champion
of child-labor legislation in the South was Edgar Gardner Murphy,
an Episcopalian clergyman who founded the Alabama Child Labor
Committee, the first organization of its kind in the country. Through
a series of newspaper articles and widely circulated pamphlets
Murphy succeeded in arousing public sentiment to the evils of
unregulated child labor. Not the least effective of his points was
that representatives of Northern capital were leading the opposition
to the enactment of child-labor bills in the South. In one of his
pamphlets he demolished the ingenious argument that children were
better off working in the mills than idling on the streets by asking:
"Are the probable iniquities of little children under twelve so great
that we can save them only by the antidote of sustained labor in
the factory for ten or twelve hours a day?"55

Within a few years after 1901, but not without a hard struggle,
Alabama, Georgia, the Carolinas, and several other Southern states

Social Striving 218

enacted measures establishing a legal minimum age for child workers
in manufacturing establishments. In the textile states the mill interests,
although unable to prevent the passage of the acts, were influential
enough to keep them weak. In Alabama, for example, the minimum
age was twelve and the maximum work week was sixty-six hours.
The laws permitted children below the legal age to work if their
earnings were needed to support themselves, widowed mothers, or
disabled fathers. In some cases no provision was made for enforce-
ment; where it was made, enforcement was vitiated by making the
affidavit or statement of parents the only required proof of age.
Experience in the Northern states had already proved that parents
who were willing to put their children to work did not scruple to
perjure themselves in stating the children's ages.56

Meanwhile efforts were under way in the North to broaden the
coverage and strengthen the enforcement features of child-labor
laws passed before the turn of the century. The reformers, aided
by the vigorous support of organized labor, scored impressive vic-
tories in New Jersey in 1902 and in New York, Illinois, and Wis-
consin in 1903. The labor unions had been active in the movement
since the days of the Knights of Labor in the 1880's, and Gompers
only slightly exaggerated the facts when he declared: "There is not
a child labor law on the statute books of the United States but has
been put there by the efforts of the tradeTunion movement."57 It is
unlikely, however, that the campaign against child labor would have
made such rapid headway after 1900 had it not been for the pressure
brought to bear on both public opinion and legislatures by voluntary
groups such as the consumers' leagues, state charities aid associations,
federations of women's clubs, and the child-labor committees. It was
the New York Child Labor Committee, organized by settlement
workers and headed by Hunter, that drafted the act of 1903 and
contrived to push the measure through the legislature after it appeared
to be headed for certain defeat.58

At the meeting of the National Conference of Charities and
Correction held in Atlanta in 1903 Murphy delivered an address
entitled "Child Labor as a National Problem." He did not deny the
culpability of the South in permitting large numbers of boys and
girls to work too long and at too early an age, but he asserted that
Northern investors had a responsibility for fastening the system of
child labor on the South; he also pointed out that if the proportion

The Home and the Child 219

of child to adult laborers was larger in the South than elsewhere in
the nation, the actual number of working children was greater in the
one state of Pennsylvania than in all the Southern states combined.59
A few months later Murphy joined with members of the New York
Child Labor Committee in issuing a call for a conference to discuss
the possibility of establishing a national organization to promote
child-labor legislation. It was at this meeting in 1904 that the National
Child Labor Committee was founded.60

The National Committee established its headquarters at a familiar
New York address, the United Charities Building, which also shel-
tered the A.I.C.P., the C.O.S., the Children's Aid Society, and the
National Consumers' League. No less familiar were the names listed
on its roster of officers and board of trustees. Felix Adler of Columbia
University, founder of the Ethical Culture movement and long-time
crusader for tenement-house reform, was its chairman; Florence
Kelley, Jane Addams, Lillian Wald, Murphy, Devine, and De Forest
were on the board of trustees. The original purpose of the organiza-
tion was to work for better state regulation of child labor. To this
end it investigated and publicized the facts concerning child workers
in textile mills, glass factories, berry fields, canneries, the street trades,
and messenger service. It drew up a model child-labor bill, encouraged
the formation of state and local committees, pointed out failures in
enforcement of existing statutes, and lobbied for the enactment of
more stringent and enforceable laws.61

The standards recommended by the National Child Labor Com-
mittee called for a minimum age of fourteen in manufacturing and
sixteen in mining; a maximum working day of eight hours; prohibi-
tion of night work; and documentary proof of age. At the time of
the Committee's organization in 1904 no state had legislation that
met all these requirements, and many fell far below the standard.
There were still a few states without minimum age requirements,
some that imposed no limit on the number of hours a child might
work, and several that had no compulsory-education laws.

In the decade after 1904 very considerable progress was made
in stamping out some of the most flagrant abuses of child labor, but
these advances were made only with extreme difficulty and were
often accompanied by disheartening reverses. If employers in the
Carolinas were adamant in opposing the adoption of fourteen years
as the minimum age for employment, manufacturers in Pennsylvania

Social Strioing 220

and Massachusetts were no less hostile to the establishment of eight
hours as the maximum working day for children.62 In Pennsylvania,
"that state of colossal industrial crimes,,, the glass factories secured
exemption from the law prohibiting night work for children, although
—or perhaps because— they were the worst offenders in this practice.63
Florence Kelley computed the average cost of violating the child-
labor laws in Pennsylvania at twenty-three cents.64 It was in Penn-
sylvania that officials fought proposals to substitute documentary
proof of age for parents' affidavits, despite the fact that coroners'
inquests revealed children of ten and eleven among the victims of
mine disasters.65

Canneries sought and obtained exclusion from child-labor stat-
utes on the ground that their work was light and wholesome and
that children worked in the sheds "for the fun of the thing and to
earn pocket money"— much as they might have sold lemonade at
their own doorsteps.66 Everywhere child labor in agriculture and
domestic service escaped regulation except as affected by compulsory-
education laws. Poverty permits and authorizations to work outside
of school hours or during school vacations kept the number of child
laborers at a high level even in those states that prided themselves
on the stringency of their laws.67

A continuing obstacle in the path of reform was the popular
belief that "child labor" meant factory work. Census figures showed
that the overwhelming majority of child workers— somewhere in the
neighborhood of 85 per cent— labored outside the factories in occu-
pations that, because of legal exemptions or loopholes in the laws,
were often unregulated by statute. The street trades in general and
newspaper selling in particular were cases in point. In the eyes of
the law the newsboys, bootblacks, and peddlers were "independent
contractors," not employees, and hence outside the scope of the
regular child-labor laws.68 A few efforts were made to control the
street trades through licensing systems, but the results were mostly
so unsatisfactory that many reformers came to believe that child labor
on the streets was an evil requiring prohibition, not regulation.

For the first ten years that it was in existence the National
Child Labor Committee withheld its support from proposals for
federal regulation of child labor. Very shortly after its formation,

The Home and the Child 221

however, officers of the National Committee began to feel that much
of the energies and resources of the Committee was being expended
in collecting information that might better and more appropriately
be obtained by a government agency. The idea of establishing such
an agency actually antedated the founding of the Committee.
Florence Kelley had lectured on the desirability of a national com-
mission for children as early as 1900, and Lillian Wald had first
proposed the creation of a permanent children's bureau in one of
the federal departments in 1903. It was not until 1906, however,
that the Child Labor Committee was able to secure the introduction
into Congress of a bill providing for the establishment of the
bureau, and public hearings on it did not begin until three years
later. In the interim members of the Committee sought to drum up
support for the plan in and out of Congress. They were responsible
for the calling of the White House Conference on the Care of
Dependent Children in 1909, a meeting that appears to have been
designed primarily to influence Congress to pass the children's
bureau bill.69

At the conclusion of the conference President Roosevelt sent a
special message to Congress urging favorable action on the measure.
The functions proposed for the new bureau were to

. . . investigate and report . . . upon all matters pertaining to the wel-
fare of children and child life among all classes of our people, and
. . . especially . . . the questions of infant mortality, the birth rate,
orphanage, juvenile courts, desertion, dangerous occupations, acci-
dents and diseases of children, employment, legislation affecting
children in the several States and Territories.70

Congress finally passed the act creating a Children's Bureau in the
Department of Commerce and Labor in 1912; but even after it had
done so appropriations for the new agency were miserly. Neverthe-
less, the very establishment of the Bureau represented a victory, not
just for the Child Labor Committee, but for the profession of social
work. There had been no dearth of fact-finding agencies and investi-
gating commissions in the past, but the institution of a permanent
bureau whose continuing task was to keep the nation informed on
the conditions under which children lived, worked, were injured,
became delinquent, and died in infancy marked a new departure in
governmental policy.71 Acceptance of the obligation to seek and

Social Striving 222

disseminate facts about child life signified that the federal govern-
ment was consciously, albeit cautiously, entering the broad field of
welfare services.

An unexpected result of the White House Conference of 1909
was the impetus the meeting gave to the movement for mothers' or
widows' pensions. Among other topics the Conference debated home
versus institutional care for dependent children. Despite the embar-
rassing objection that the homes of the poor were far from satisfac-
tory, the delegates went on record as favoring keeping the children
of worthy parents in their own homes rather than placing them in
institutions. They recommended, however, that the necessary finan-
cial aid be furnished by private charity instead of by public relief.72

The latter recommendation attracted much less notice than the
Conference's pronouncement, "Home life is the highest and finest
product of civilization"— a sentiment heartily endorsed by President
Roosevelt in his special message to Congress on the children's bureau
bill. In the next few years state after state (twenty by 1913) enacted
laws authorizing financial assistance from public funds to widowed
or abandoned mothers of young children. The theory was that it
was preferable to give to the mother, for use in maintaining her family
at home, the money that the state would otherwise have to expend
in supporting children in public institutions. The payments were
modest, ranging from $2.00 a week to $15 a month for the first
child, with smaller grants for each additional one. These allowances
were granted only after careful examination of the home and proof
of the mother's need; generally speaking, the payments ceased after
the children reached the legal working age.73 In practice the laws
were sometimes less inclusive than their titles implied: they might
apply only to "cities of the first class" and be only permissive; that
is, communities were authorized to make the payments if they chose
to do so and provided they were able to finance the program, in
whole or part, from local funds.74

Social workers were divided in their attitude toward the mothers'
pension movement. The historic insistence of scientific philanthropy
that assistance should be given in kind rather than in cash was begin-
ning to break down.75 As indicated by the recommendation of the
White House Conference, however, many professional welfare
workers retained a lingering suspicion of public outdoor relief.

The Home and the Child 223

Critics of mothers' pensions also protested that in spite of the name
of the program, the payments constituted arbitrarily determined
grants for children and were not geared to the needs of the mother
or of the home.76

An even more fundamental objection was that mothers' pensions
were only temporizing devices. They were not attempts to remedy
the underlying causes of distress. They did not stop the preventable
deaths that made widows; they did nothing to block the forces that
made families destitute; they did not require the payment of higher
wages or provide security against sickness, accident, or unemploy-
ment. All that the mothers' pensions did, and all that they were
intended to do, was to provide a tiny dole until such time as children
reached the minimum working age.

These criticisms were, perhaps, unduly harsh. The enactment
of the mothers' pension laws was a forward step in the battle against
poverty; for their adoption involved recognition that the provision
by the state of financial aid in the presence of want has positive
value and is not merely an irksome necessity.77 The ire of the more
radical reformers was directed not so much at the pension laws
themselves as at the uncritical attitude of mind that was satisfied with
palliatives. From their point of view the chief danger was that, by
easing consciences and providing a cheap outlet for sentimental talk,
the mothers' pension movement might postpone consideration of
more serious reforms. It did not surprise them that such well-inten-
tioned but superficial proposals were passed with ease and alacrity
while more basic issues were avoided. Mothers' pensions hurt no
interests— and they cost very little.78

The first formal attempt to bring child labor under federal
control was made in 1906 when Senator Albert J. Beveridge of
Indiana and Congressman Herbert Parsons of New York introduced
identical bills designed to prohibit the interstate transportation of
articles produced in factories or mines employing child labor. Later
in the same session Beveridge proposed his bill as an amendment to
a measure for the regulation of child labor in the District of Colum-
bia. To the considerable annoyance of his colleagues the Senator held
the floor for four days, during which time he presented numerous
affidavits on child-labor conditions prepared by field representatives
of the A.F.L. and read lengthy passages from the writings of Mrs.

Social Striving 224

Kelley, Spargo, the Van Vorsts, and A. J. McKelway, secretary of
the National Child Labor Committee for the Southern states. The
burden of his address was that the states were incompetent to deal
with the problem, a point that the National Child Labor Committee
was not yet ready to concede. To the usual catalogue of the evils
of child slavery Beveridge added a new and startling warning that
the practice of putting children to work at tender ages was under-
mining white superiority: "Whereas the children of the white work-
ing people of the South are going to the mill and to decay, the Negro
children are going to school and improvement."79

No action was taken on the Beveridge amendment, but on the
day his oration came to a close the President signed an act directing
the Secretary of Commerce and Labor to investigate and report

... on the industrial, social, moral, educational, and physical condi-
tion of woman and child workers in the United States wherever
employed with special reference to their age, hours of labor, terms
of employment, health, illiteracy, sanitary and other conditions sur-
rounding their occupation, and the means employed for the protec-
tion of their health, person, and morals.80

The nineteen volumes required to provide the requested information
appeared between 1910 and 1913. The conditions revealed by the
report, together with the census returns of 1910, which showed that
some two million children under sixteen were at work in the United
States, made the need for federal regulation more evident than it
had been when Beveridge introduced his amendment.

Between 1906 and 1912 officers of the National Child Labor
Committee hesitated to support proposals for federal child-labor
legislation for fear that advocacy of such measures would jeopardize
the passage of the children's bureau bill. Moreover, the National
Committee contained Southern representatives such as Murphy who
were opposed, on constitutional and emotional grounds, to national
interference in a matter that lay within the traditional boundaries of
state responsibility. By 1914, however, only nine states had met all
the standards recommended by the Committee ten years earlier.
Twenty-two commonwealths still permitted children under fourteen
to be employed in factories; sixteen neglected to demand documentary
proof of age for working children; twenty-eight permitted children
to work more than eight hours a day; and twenty-three had failed
to adopt adequate limitations on night work. Between states special-

The Home and the Child 225

izing in the same industries— Massachusetts and North Carolina, for
example— there remained in child-labor standards wide differences
that gave an unwholesome competitive advantage to those with the
lower legal requirements. The more progressive states were becoming
still more progressive; but the backward ones continued, by com-
parison, to be as resolutely and defiantly backward as ever.81 Despite
the opposition of the Southern members, many of whom left the
organization, the Committee was forced to the conclusion that it was
hopeless to expect uniform and moderately high child-labor stand-
ards to be achieved on a nationwide basis by state action.

A number of other organizations, including the A.F.L., the
American Medical Association, the National Consumers' League,
and the Federal Council of Churches of Christ in America joined
the Child Labor Committee in urging the passage of the Palmer-
Owen bill when it was introduced in Congress in 1914. Both major
parties came out in favor of the measure in their 1916 platforms.
Only the counsel of the National Association of Manufacturers and
representatives of Southern textile interests appeared in opposition at
the congressional hearings. As enacted in 1916 the federal law adopted
the major recommendations of the National Child Labor Committee.
It prohibited the shipment in interstate commerce of goods produced
in factories or mines that employed children under fourteen years
of age (sixteen in the mines), or worked children between fourteen
and sixteen more than eight hours a day or at night.82

Supporters of federal regulation failed to reckon with the
conservatism of the judiciary. Three days before the law was sched-
uled to go into effect a federal district judge in North Carolina
issued an injunction staying its enforcement in order to protect the
rights of Reuben and John Dagenhart, aged fourteen and twelve
respectively, to work more than eight hours a day and before reach-
ing the age of fourteen. The Supreme Court had previously upheld
congressional use of the commerce clause to exclude impure food,
the white-slave trade, and lotteries from interstate commerce; by a
five-to-four decision handed down in 1918, however, the Court
declared the child-labor law unconstitutional as an improper exercise
of the power to regulate interstate commerce.83

Within a few months after the first law had been declared uncon-
stitutional Congress passed a second child-labor law in the guise of an
amendment to the Revenue Act of 1919. The standards governing

Social Striving 226

the employment of children set forth in the earlier statute were
repeated, but instead of excluding goods produced in violation of
these requirements from interstate commerce, the new law made such
goods subject to a tax of 10 per cent over and above all other taxes.

The fate that befell the first law soon overtook the second. The
same federal judge enjoined the enforcement of the act, and when
the Supreme Court ruled on the case it declared the law unconstitu-
tional as an improper exercise of the taxing power. The Court had
earlier given its sanction to the application of prohibitory taxes on
phosphorus matches, narcotics, and yellow oleomargarine. Its attitude
now appeared to be that some limitation must be placed on the taxing
device lest Congress gain unlimited power to regulate.84 To reformers
it seemed singularly in keeping with the social viewpoint of the
Court that its members should deem regulation of child labor the
proper point at which to draw the line.

These two decisions left supporters of national regulation no
alternative but to seek a constitutional amendment conferring on
Congress power to protect working children. No serious difficulty
was encountered in obtaining the consent of the Senate and the
House to the proposed amendment granting Congress authority "to
limit, regulate, and prohibit the labor of persons under eighteen
years of age," and it was submitted to the states in 1924.85 Obtaining
state ratification proved to be an entirely different matter. During
the first few months the issue was before the country three times
as many states rejected the amendment as adopted it. Within little
more than a year it was evident that the approval of the requisite
number of states could not be obtained.86

Rejection of the amendment was the first and most serious
defeat suffered by social reform in the United States in the twentieth
century. There had been earlier setbacks in plenty, but these could
be written off as merely temporary reverses attributable to judicial
hairsplitting or legislative timidity. The defeat of the child-labor
amendment was a much more fundamental blow to progressivism.
It demonstrated, not only the strength of reactionary forces, which
was well known, but also a quite unexpected susceptibility on the
part of the public to abstract and irrational (or perhaps overrational)
arguments.

It is important, but not at all easy, to explain the factors that
made possible the defeat of the amendment. The postwar slump in

The Home arid the Child 227

idealism encouraged the revival of a species of lawless individualism
at all levels of society. Federal regulation, never popular in some
circles, and made less so by the imposition of extraordinary economic
controls during the war, was further discredited by experience with
the national prohibition amendment. Prohibition produced revulsion
against reform and reformers within the ranks of liberals, and
imparted new luster to the theory of states' rights, even in the eyes
of persons who had not previously displayed much enthusiasm for
the doctrine. Meanwhile, in an atmosphere of intense nationalism,
"Americanism' ' took on a new meaning. To the superpatriots of the
1920's Americanism was not an evolving process of social improve-
ment, but a static concept compatible only with the most extreme
varieties of economic and political conservatism. In these circum-
stances, those who had a material interest in the maintenance of
freedom from effective regulation of child labor were able to enlist
widespread support in agricultural, industrial, and professedly patri-
otic groups, and by shrewdly developed techniques of misrepresen-
tation they succeeded in rallying an effective segment of public
opinion against the amendment.

None of the opponents of the amendment defended child labor.
Some of them went so far as to pronounce idleness "the devil's best
workshop." In general, however, they paid lip service to the ideals
of the reformers, loudly proclaimed their own love of children and
devotion to wise child-labor laws. Their argument was simply that
child labor was "practically nonexistent." Having thus disposed of
the real issue of the debate, they were free to denounce the amend-
ment as the work of vicious plotters intent on destroying local self-
government, nationalizing the children, and subverting the authority
of the family, home, church, and school. They represented the spon-
sors of the measure as fanatics determined to stop young boys from
the wholesome exertion of milking the family cow, to prevent young
girls from the maidenly task of washing dishes, and to spare all
children under eighteen from the nightly chore of school home-
work.87

That such arguments were presented at all indicates either an
extremely theoretical turn of mind or a cynical contempt for truth
and for public intelligence. That they were accepted in good faith
by a considerable portion of the electorate bespeaks a naivete
bordering on gullibility, if not a more deep-seated preference of

Social Strioing 228

myth to reality. The reformers had trained themselves to deal in
facts; they had confided their hopes in a belief that truth, dissemi-
nated widely, would inspire all good citizens to intelligent action.
They had not yet learned the bitterest lesson of the twentieth
century— that untruth, disseminated widely by forces possessing un-
limited funds to expend on propaganda, is the most effective method
yet devised to stem the advance of democratic reform.

Sooner or later advocates and opponents of housing and child-
labor legislation reached agreement on one point. This was that
neither the abolition of the slum nor the effective regulation of child
labor was likely to be achieved without involving many other reforms.
Every housing survey and each investigation of working children
forced some consideration of the entire labor problem; every serious
attempt to improve the home or save the children turned attention
toward low wages, unemployment, industrial accidents, sickness, and
the general atmosphere of economic insecurity.

The tendency of movements for the elimination of specific
abuses to burst out of prescribed channels and merge with the larger
stream of social amelioration distressed conservatives, but it only
served to heighten the enthusiasm and zeal of progressive reformers.
Felix Adler, first chairman of the National Child Labor Committee,
frankly expressed the hope that the campaign against child labor
would redound to the benefit of adult workers:

... if once it comes to be an understood thing that a certain sacred-
ness "doth hedge around" a child, that a child is industrially taboo,
that to violate its rights is to touch profanely a holy thing, that it
has a soul which must not be blighted for the prospect of mere gain;
if this be once generally conceded with regard to the child the same
essential reasoning will be found to apply also to adult workers; they,
too, will not be looked upon as mere commodities, as mere instru-
ments for the accumulation of riches; to them also a certain sacred-
ness will be seen to attach, and certain human rights to belong, which
may not be infringed.88

In 1909 Jane Addams suggested that desire to protect and preserve
children from want might serve as the means of correcting American
backwardness in social legislation.89 Almost thirty years later, speak-
ing with the authority of a half century of experience in welfare
movements, Homer Folks reminded a younger generation of child-

The Home and the Child 229

labor reformers that they discharged only a portion of their respon-
sibilities to children when they worked for better regulatory legisla-
tion; they must in addition give active support "to all measures which
will bring a greater degree of economic security to that third of our
population which still is 'ill-housed, ill-clad, and ill-nourished/ and
which turns to child labor as one source of added income."90

CHAPTER J 3

Women's Hours and Wages

The courts here deal with statutes seeking to affect in a very con-
crete fashion the sternest actualities of modern life: the conduct of
industry and the labor of human beings therein engaged. Yet the cases
are decided, in the main, on abstract issues, on tenacious theories of
economic and political philosophy.

Felix Frankfurter, "Hours of Labor and Realism
in Constitutional Law."

THE logical sequel to child-labor laws was regulation of the
hours and conditions of women's work. Inspectors charged with
enforcing legal restrictions on the employment of children
repeatedly complained of the difficulty of securing compliance with
those laws as long as girls below the minimum working age were
able to obtain jobs by pretending to be a year or so older than they
actually were. Reformers pointed out that if girls under fourteen
were deemed too young to be allowed to work, "women" of fifteen
or sixteen deserved protection against overwork.1 Persons of widely
varying political and economic outlooks recognized the need for state
intervention to conserve the health and energies of workingwomen
for the responsibilities of motherhood. The cause held an especial
appeal for feminists, who inclined toward the view that woman had
always performed the important work of the world and had always
been exploited by the predatory male.2 Workingmen, however, were
scarcely less sympathetic; for it was readily apparent to them that
the low wages and long hours that prevailed in industries employing
large numbers of women and children dragged down the level of
labor as a whole, made the achievement of better conditions for men

230

Women's Hours and Wages 231

difficult, and menaced the gains secured by collective bargaining in
the organized trades.

Most of the laws regulating women's work enacted before 1900
stemmed directly or indirectly from the agitation of organized labor.
Legislators unswayed by other arguments could not afford to be
utterly indifferent to the power of workingmen at the ballot box and
therefore sometimes gave favorable consideration to bills that might
otherwise have received scant attention. Both humanitarian con-
siderations and self-interest dictated that workingmen seek legal
protection for— and from— workingwomen. Organized labor wel-
comed legislation for women that gave legal sanction to the shorter
hours that the stronger unions had previously won from employers
by collective bargaining. Men employed in the textile mills, where
women and children comprised a large percentage of the labor force,
fought gallantly for statutes limiting the workday of their sisters and
protecting women from the rigors of night work— knowing full well
that their own hours of work would be determined by the legal
standards set for women. In a few instances craft unions sponsored
legislation to exclude women from engaging in those trades in which
male union members predominated.8

Although there was no lack of interest or want of support for
women's hour legislation, little progress had been made in this reform
by the late nineties. Only a fourth of the states had adopted maximum
hour laws, and in only three of these were the limitations effective.
The others had not provided for enforcement or had so phrased
their statutes that employers could be punished only for "willful"
violations or for "compelling" employees to work longer than the
maximum number of hours. With few exceptions the legal limit was
ten hours; only two states prohibited night work in manufacturing;
and only one had extended its protection to women employed outside
of factories.4

More serious than the paucity, limited coverage, and lax enforce-
ment of the women's hour laws was the fact that after 1895 their
constitutionality was open to question. In that year the Supreme
Court of Illinois ruled a law fixing eight hours as the maximum
working day for women invalid on the double grounds that the
statute was class legislation and that it interfered with freedom of
contract. This decision did not entirely discourage the enactment of

Social Striving 232

hour laws in other states, but for more than a decade the constitu-
tional issues it raised served as a fairly effective deterrent to further
action and made the enforcement of existing laws difficult.5

The most important agency working to establish the legality
of labor legislation for women was the National Consumers' League,
whose general secretary and leading spirit was Florence Kelley. The
socialist daughter of a long-time Republican congressman from
Pennsylvania, a licensed attorney, and a veteran of many reform
battles, Mrs. Kelley brought to the League a unique combination of
radicalism, idealism, experience, and shrewdness. An early resident
of Hull House, and later an associate of Lillian Wald at the Nurses'
Settlement in New York City, she made the investigation of the
condition of women and children employed in the manufacture of
clothing in tenements and small subcontractors' sweatshops that led
the Illinois legislature to pass the eight-hour law of 1893. As chief
factory inspector of Illinois she vigorously enforced the act until it
was set aside by the state Supreme Court in 1895.6

More clearly than some of her contemporaries Mrs. Kelley
understood that reform consisted of a great deal more than the
passing of laws. Her point was not that reformers should go slow, but
that they must approach their tasks in a resolute and realistic spirit.
Statutes, being only trial drafts until approved by the courts, must
be so carefully drawn and so expertly defended that judges could
not deny their validity. No less imperative, if the laws were to be
enforced, was the preparation of the community, intellectually and
ethically, to accept the reforms that legislation sought to establish.
In her opinion there were already abundant examples of laws that
communities were willing to place on their statute books but that
they were reluctant to have enforced.7

The Consumers' League had begun as an attempt by Josephine
Shaw Lowell and prominent society women in New York to obtain
better wages, hours, and working conditions for clerks and cash girls
in retail stores. Its original purpose was to organize purchasers into
an association pledged to patronize only those establishments that
dealt humanely and considerately with their employees.8 By 1899,
when the National League was organized, members of the local and
state consumers' associations had become interested in labor and
sanitary practices in factories as well as in stores. Under Mrs. Kelley's
leadership the League gathered and published data on the condition

Women's Hours and Wages 233

of women and children in industry and on the effect of long hours
and night work on their health and welfare. In pamphlet after
pamphlet the League sought to educate public opinion to the need
for better legislation, to the dangers present in the use of goods
produced under sweatshop conditions, and to the buyer's respon-
sibility for enforcing higher labor standards on producers and
retailers.

The research on which these propaganda leaflets were based was
carried out by Mrs. Kelley's principal lieutenant, Josephine Goldmark,
a young social worker who had the good fortune to be the sister-in-
law of both Felix Adler and Louis Brandeis. In addition to her duties
as publications secretary, Miss Goldmark was chairman of the
Consumers' League committee on the legal defense of labor laws.
Like Brandeis, who had once observed that "a judge is presumed to
know the elements of law, but there is no presumption that he knows
the facts," she believed that in passing on the constitutionality of
labor legislation the courts needed the guidance of testimony from
physicians, sociologists, and economists.9 As early as 1904, in a case
involving the New York child labor law, Miss Goldmark had
furnished the presiding judge with material from factory inspectors'
reports to prove the social value of the legislation. By 1907 passages
in various judicial opinions, including statements in decisions that
held labor laws unconstitutional, had convinced her and Mrs. Kelley
that women's hour legislation might be sustained by the courts if the
legal briefs made "the facts" sufficiently clear to the justices.10

An opportunity to test this thesis arose when the constitutionality
of the Oregon ten-hour law for women was challenged before the
United States Supreme Court in 1907. The National Consumers'
League undertook the defense of the statute and obtained the services
of Brandeis to present the case to the Court. The famous "Brandeis
brief" in Mutter v. Oregon (1908) consisted of two pages of legal
arguments and of more than a hundred pages outlining "the world's
experience regarding women's hours of labor." Brandeis entrusted
the preparation of the latter part of the brief to Miss Goldmark.
She and a few assistants collected, analyzed, and organized excerpts
from a mass of British, Continental, and American sources. They
drew on reports of factory inspectors, bureaus of labor statistics,
commissioners of hygiene, and official investigating committees as
well as on the observations of physicians and economists. From this

Social Striving 234

accumulation of material Miss Goldmark compiled a closely reasoned
monograph demonstrating that everywhere in the civilized world
long hours had been shown to be detrimental to the health, safety,
and morals of employed women and harmful to the general interests
of the community; whereas shorter hours instituted by law had been
proved to have a beneficial effect on efficiency, output, morality,
and welfare.11

The action of the Court in Muller v. Oregon bore out the pre-
diction made by Mrs. Kelley a dozen years earlier; she had declared
then that once the medical profession, the philanthropists, and the
educators became thoroughly aware that a workday of reasonable
length was, in literal truth, a matter of life and death to working
people, the Illinois decision of 1895 would cease to carry weight
even in legal circles.12 By unanimous vote the members of the nation's
highest tribunal pronounced the Oregon statute constitutional, thus
establishing the validity of state efforts to protect women from
excessive hours of labor. By their audacious brief, Brandeis and Miss
Goldmark had "made the law grow a hundred years in a day."13
Brandeis himself believed that the Court's ruling in this and several
subsequent cases revealed that when judges could be persuaded to
reason from life they arrived at conclusions different from those they
reached when they reasoned entirely from abstract conceptions.14
Victory for social legislation as a whole was still far from won, but
the happy outcome of this skirmish strengthened the reformers in their
conviction that factualism was the best weapon of humanitarianism.

The five years after the Muller decision saw activity in women's
hour legislation reach its peak; during the same period there was a
quickening of interest in the subject of women's wages. Social investi-
gations played a major part in both developments and, as in a number
of other reforms, the findings of the Pittsburgh survey were espe-
cially influential in creating an atmosphere of opinion congenial to
social advance. The first volume of the survey to be published was
Women and the Trades (1910) by Elizabeth Beardsley Butler, a
former secretary of the Consumers' League of New Jersey. The
author gave particular attention to the well-established custom of
paying female employees less than enough to live on— a practice based
on the theory that girls and women were rarely self-supporting and
that they usually worked only for "pin money." A box manufacturer

Women's Hours and Wages 235

candidly admitted: "We try to employ girls who are members of
families, for we don't pay the girls a living wage in this trade."15

Miss Butler showed that in the Pittsburgh district the employers'
assumption that a father or some other relative would meet the
difference between a young woman's wages and the cost of living
was often without factual basis. "That a girl is one of a family group
is quite as likely to indicate that she is chief breadwinner as that her
family is her chief bulwark against the world," she concluded.16 For
the fairly large and increasing number of girls who did not live with
their families but were entirely on their own the consequences of
underpayment were equally serious. Some of them supplemented the
scanty wages received from stores or factories by occasionally
engaging in what Miss Butler called "unsocial employment." Most
of them struggled along by systematically undereating and by prac-
ticing the most rigorous economies in housing. They could live and
continue to work on a diet of coffee for breakfast, very little or no
lunch at all, and two or three sandwiches for supper. She cited the
case of a girl who paid three dollars a week for board and room, her
"room" being a couch in the kitchen of a crowded tenement apart-
ment. She also mentioned the five young women from an iron mill
who cut expenses by sharing one room with five workmen from the
same plant.17

In 1910 the Russell Sage Foundation, which had financed the
Pittsburgh survey, established a Committee on Women's Work
headed by Mary Van Kleeck. Miss Van Kleeck had previously written
a report on the operation of the New York hour law in which she
revealed that, owing to unenforceable features in the law, women
were working as long as seventy-eight hours a week, although the
legal maximum was sixty hours.18 Her most important research for
the Sage Foundation was a series of inquiries into women's labor in
bookbinding, artificial flower making, and the millinery trade. In
these studies she conclusively proved the fallacy of the pin-money
theory and demonstrated that in case after case wages adjusted to
the supposedly meager needs of the girl who "lived at home" were
a major cause of poverty and an important factor in perpetuating it.19
For obvious reasons her monographs were frequently cited by advo-
cates of a legal minimum wage for women. It is worth noting,
however, that by 1914 Miss Van Kleeck and other officials of the
Russell Sage Foundation had become convinced that the problems

Social Striving 236

of women in industry were largely phases of conditions affecting
men as well as women. In recognition of this attitude the name of
the Committee on Women's Work was changed in 1916 to the
Division of Industrial Studies.20

Influential though the Butler and Van Kleeck studies were, they
were overshadowed by the multivolume Report on Condition of
Woman and Child Wage Earners in the United States published
by the United States Bureau of Labor between 1910 and 1913.
Despite its length, detail, and formidable array of statistical tables,
portions of the report made lively reading. There were pages in the
volume on the life of working girls in stores and factories that might
almost have been lifted from an O. Henry story. An investigator
told of one salesgirl, thin and pale, who bravely explained why she
was eating only a two-cent dish of tapioca pudding for lunch: "You
see, Fm dieting," she said. The real life working girls, however,
enjoyed less privacy than O. Henry heroines. The investigator
reported that single women living in rooming houses regularly
shared rooms with members of the landlady's family; in extreme
cases they slept in the same room with the landlady and her husband.
Calling on one workingwoman early in the evening, the investigator
was received in a room in which a male lodger had already retired
for the night. "This seemed to be the only available sitting room
and disconcerted no one save the agent."21

The most frequently recurring observation in the nineteen vol-
umes of the report was that wages of women appeared to be totally
unstandardized. The most incongruous and inexplicably wide varia-
tions in pay prevailed within the same industry for the same work.
"In the main," remarked one of the agents, "the women were wholly
unorganized and seemed to have no idea in regard to wages beyond
taking what they could get. The determining factor seemed not so
much what their services were worth or what the industry could
afford as the individual employer's attitude upon the matter."
Instances were not lacking of employers who desired to treat their
employees justly; but neither was there any scarcity of employers
who made it a practice to pay women and girls the very least they
could be induced to accept. In almost no employment was there any
generally accepted standard of a fair wage for women. "What a
woman could earn by a week's work," concluded the agent, "seemed

Women's Hours and Wages 237

to depend fully as much upon extrinsic factors over which she had
no possible control as upon her own ability or her own efforts."22

A strike originating among employees of the Triangle Waist
Company in New York in 1909, but eventually spreading to at least
20,000 other women in the garment trades, aroused unusual public
interest in the wage problem. During the strike it became known
that waist makers working at top speed for as long as seventy hours
earned only four or five dollars a week. The stirring of sympathy
provoked by this disclosure was as nothing compared to the out-
burst of indignation that followed news that 148 persons, mostly
girls and young women, had been burned, smothered, or trampled
to death in a fire on the top floors of a loft building housing the
Triangle Company. The firm had been as thoughtless of safety as
it was stingy with wages. Carl Sandburg's elegy for the victim of
another factory fire might have been written for the Triangle girls:
"It is the hand of God and the lack of fire escapes."23

One positive result of the storm of protest aroused by the
needless loss of life in the Triangle fire was the appointment of the
New York State Factory Investigating Commission. For three years
members of the investigating group examined all phases of industrial
working conditions, weighed proposed methods of dealing with them,
and prepared reports and recommendations for the guidance of the
legislature. At the instigation of the Commission the legislature
overhauled the existing industrial code of the state by enacting
more than thirty-five new factory laws in the space of two
years. The subsequent championing of labor legislation by Senator
Robert F. Wagner and Governor Alfred E. Smith may be attributed
in large part to the knowledge and experience the two men acquired
as chairman and vice-chairman, respectively, of this Commission.24

In its Second Report (1913) the Factory Investigating Com-
mission recommended passage of a law prohibiting the labor of
women between the hours of 10 p.m. and 6 a.m. A similar law
adopted in 1899 had been in effect until 1907, when it was declared
unconstitutional by the New York Court of Appeals. The Commis-
sion therefore included in its report a brief, patterned after the one
submitted in Muller v. Oregon, setting forth both the legal argu-
ments and the " Tacts of Common Knowledge' Concerning Night
Work" in defense of the proposed statute.25 Acting on the Com-

Social Striving 238

mission's recommendation, the legislature adopted the measure. When
the Court passed on the new law in 1915 it reversed its earlier
decision, citing the information gathered by the Commission, and
additional data supplied by Brandeis and Miss Goldmark, as grounds
for justifying prohibition of night work for women. Once more it
seemed to the friends of reform that factualism had scored a victory
over legalism.26

Each investigation of women's work, whether conducted by
private foundations, the federal government, or state commissions,
brought to light shocking instances of underpayment and presented
new evidence of the dangerous effects of miserable earnings on
women's health and welfare. It could scarcely be denied that many
women were poorly paid because they possessed no skill, training,
or experience to make their services valuable to employers; they re-
ceived substandard earnings because they were substandard workers.
But this was not the only reason why women's wages were so often
disgracefully low. There was, in addition, the convenient fiction
that the majority of female employees had no real economic re-
sponsibilities and that the wages paid them were therefore matters
of little consequence. There was also the fact that intense competition
in some lines of manufacture forced all employers to make cheapness
their goal and to sacrifice every other consideration to this end.
And, quite aside from skill or the lack of it, there was the poverty
of applicants for jobs. "It is the worker nearest starvation who is
most likely to accept starvation wages," warned Mary Van Kleeck.27
In the circumstances it sometimes appeared that the greed of the
worst employers and the need of the poorest workers were the
principal factors in determining rates of pay for women.

As a way out of the dilemma reformers suggested the establish-
ment of a legal minimum wage for women. Support for this
reform, first proposed in 1906 by Father John A. Ryan, devel-
oped rapidly after 191 0.28 Previously it had seemed unlikely that
any American state would countenance so obvious a departure from
laissez faire, but the adoption in England in 1909 of an act authorizing
the appointment of wage boards to fix minimum rates of pay in
the sweated trades attracted favorable attention in this country,29
Recent progress in state regulation of women's hours further en-
couraged reformers to believe that state intervention in the field of

Women's Hours and Wages 239

women's wages was feasible. The Consumers' League from its found-
ing had made the payment of a living wage one of the first require-
ments to be met by establishments placed on its approved list. After
1910 Florence Kelley and other national and state officials of the
League, including Father Ryan and John R. Commons, placed
minimum- wage legislation on the "must" list of the organization's
program. About the same time, and partly through the influence
of Mrs. Kelley, two other voluntary organizations, the American
Association for Labor Legislation and the Women's Trade Union
League, enlisted in the campaign for women's wage laws.30

A not altogether unfounded but perhaps exaggerated notion
of the extent of white slavery in the United States did much to
build up popular and legislative support for the minimum-wage idea.
Beginning in the 1890's, and increasingly after 1900, civic groups
in Chicago and New York had investigated prostitution, especially
in its relationship to police graft, the saloons, and political cor-
ruption. George Kibbe Turner's article "The Daughters of the Poor"
(1909) and Reginald Wright Kauffman's novel The House of
Bondage (1910) added to the great wave of interest in the subject
—an interest which, on the national level, led to the enactment of
the Mann Act of 1910.31 Nearly all the investigators of women's
labor gave some attention to the connection between low wages
and prostitution. Miss Butler's comment was typical: "So long as
custom or fact renders the payment of a full living wage nonessential,
economic needs impel many a girl toward a personally degrading
life."32 Where other arguments for the payment of a living wage-
as valid as this one, or perhaps more valid— were ignored, the
suggestion that low wages tempted or forced women into prosti-
tution made a strong impression. In the opinion of one contemporary
observer, fear of sexual immorality was a major factor in precipi-
tating the sudden flood of minimum-wage bills in 1913.33

Popular concern over low wages, not the pressure of organized
labor, was responsible for the passage of minimum-wage laws. Gen-
erally speaking, union leaders were suspicious of the principle of
governmental interference in the province of wages and somewhat
fearful that the legal minimum might in practice become the going
rate. Except in California, state federations of labor did not actively
oppose the bills, but their support was ordinarily only lukewarm.
Labor disputes, however, were a factor in arousing sentiment for

Social Striving 240

wage legislation. In Massachusetts, the first state to adopt a minimum-
wage law, the Consumers' League and other voluntary associations
prepared the ground for reform, but it was the Lawrence strike of
1912, precipitated by a cut in wages at the textile mills, that finally
convinced public opinion that legislative action was necessary, if
only to prevent recurrence of labor disorders of like magnitude.34

Following the lead of Massachusetts, fourteen states enacted
laws affecting women's wages between 1913 and 1923. More than
half of these laws were passed in 1913. Broadly considered, the
statutes were of two kinds. In Massachusetts and Nebraska employers
were free to accept or reject the wage established as a fair minimum
by a state commission; there was no coercion except that the com-
mission published the names of the firms that failed to pay women
employees the approved minimum. In Oregon and most of the other
states, however, compliance with the minimum determined by the
industrial commission was made compulsory for all employers. The
model bill drafted by the Consumers' League was of the mandatory
type, and it was this measure that Congress enacted into law for
the District of Columbia in 1918.35

The Oregon statute was the first of the minimum-wage laws
to be challenged in the courts. The State Industrial Welfare Com-
mission, whose secretary, Father Edwin V. O'Hara, had been the
chairman of the Oregon Consumers' League, set the minimum wage
for experienced adult women workers at eight dollars and sixty-four
cents per week. A paper-box manufacturer and one of his employees,
who professed satisfaction with her weekly earnings of eight dollars,
moved to have the law set aside on the grounds that it interfered
with "the operation of natural and economic laws" and destroyed
property and employment without due process of law. At the
request of the Industrial Welfare Commission Brandeis submitted
a brief in support of the law before the Oregon Supreme Court
and, following the favorable decision of that tribunal, argued the
validity of the Oregon statute before the United States Supreme
Court in 1914.

The case was not decided until 1917. By this time Brandeis
had been elevated to the Bench, and he, of course, did not take
part in the decision. His arguments in 1914, however, and the ex-
haustive array of sociological, medical, and economic data Miss

Women's Hours and Wages 241

Goldmark gathered for his brief won the approval of half of the
eight members of the Court who participated in the decision. The
effect of the justices' four-to-four vote in Stealer v. O'Hara was to
leave standing the Oregon Supreme Court's ruling that had pro-
nounced the law constitutional.36

Some enthusiasts, mistakenly assuming that the Court's action
had settled the constitutionality of the issue, expected that this judg-
ment would give the same impetus to minimum-wage legislation that
Muller v. Oregon had provided for women's hour laws. In fact, the
Court's split decision did little to stimulate the further enactment
of wage bills. Some few laws, including the federal statute for the
District of Columbia, were passed after 1917, but even before the
Stettler decision there were signs that the movement was losing
momentum. The opposition had begun to stiffen as early as the
legislative sessions of 1915; by 1917 important industrial states such
as New York, Michigan, Ohio, and Missouri had already rejected
or deferred action on minimum-wage bills. Thereafter it was in-
creasingly difficult to maintain the earlier popular interest in the
reform, especially when talk ran high about unprecedentedly high
earnings enjoyed by unskilled workers in war industries.

Without the strong backing of middle-class opinion and denied
the active support of organized labor, the reformers made slight
headway against the thoroughly aroused opposition of merchants'
and manufacturers' associations. These groups affirmed their complete
adherence to the sound business policy of paying employees fair
wages— and denounced all efforts, whether by statute or trade-union
activity, to insure observance of this wholesome practice as certain
to harm business. Compulsory minimum-wage laws, when not
branded socialistic, were decried because they stifled the employer's
humanitarian motives. Voluntary legislation was scarcely less repre-
hensible if it entailed "vicious publicity" for firms refusing to comply
with the minimum rates. In the heat of the fight manufacturers'
associations counseled members to make gifts to such organizations
as the Y.W.C.A. contingent on the promise that no part of the
contribution should be used to promote the passage of, or to carry
on propaganda for, any "social-service labor program."37

During the controversy over the New York minimum wage
bill (recommended by the Factory Investigating Commission but
not passed by the legislature) Walter Lippmann commented that

Social Striving 242

if it were not for the war, which had accustomed men and women
to the sight of whole nations glowering at one another from "holes
in the mud,"

it would be hard to believe that America with all its riches could still
be primitive enough to grunt and protest at a living wage— a living
wage, mind you; not a wage so its women can live well, not enough
to make life a rich and welcome experience, but just enough to se-
cure existence amid drudgery in gray boardinghouses and cheap
restaurants.

Alarmed conservatives protested that radical innovations such as
minimum-wage laws would undermine the foundations of the Re-
public. "But you cannot ruin a country by conserving its life,"
Lippmann replied. "You can ruin a country only by its stupidity,
waste, and greed."38

After the war opponents of minimum-wage legislation found
a valuable ally in the federal judiciary. The manufacturers' associa-
tions prevented the passage of new laws; the courts undid the work
of reformers in the states and territories that had already adopted
them. In 1923 the United States Supreme Court held the District
of Columbia minimum-wage law to be an illegal interference with
the right of contract and hence unconstitutional. On the basis of
this ruling six state minimum-wage statutes were found unconstitu-
tional and the publicity provision of the voluntary act of Massa-
chusetts was declared invalid. Justice George Sutherland spoke for
the majority of the Court in Adkins v. Children's Hospital (1923),
the leading decision.39 He dismissed the compilation of reports of
industrial investigations, expert opinion, and informed observations
that Felix Frankfurter adduced in support of the law as "interesting
but only mildly persuasive." If the Brandeis brief in Muller v. Oregon
had "made the law grow a hundred years in a day," the Sutherland
opinion caused it to retrograde as far in a single sentence. Returning
to the narrowly legalistic opinion the court had abandoned fifteen
years earlier, Sutherland asserted that the sociological data in the
brief, although proper for the consideration of legislative bodies,
had no standing in a court of law, since they shed no light on the
issue of the law's constitutionality.40

The Sutherland opinion blocked further progress in minimum-
wage legislation for a decade and a half. Its implications for other
social reforms were no less ominous; for it signified not only a revival

Women's Hours and Wages 243

of extreme conservatism but also a repudiation of factualism. In
rejecting the appeal of ascertained facts and avowing an almost
aesthetic doctrine of law for law's sake, Justice Sutherland and the
majority of the Supreme Court were doing more than turning the
clock back: they were stopping it. The importance of the Adkins
case rests not so much in the decision, later reversed, that minimum-
wage laws were unconstitutional, as in the intellectual attitude
expressed by the justices. This attitude is by no means confined to
the judiciary or to persons who are called or call themselves con-
servative. It is the tendency to regard the practical issues of human
welfare as immaterial and to endow abstract conceptions of rights
and liberties with reality. Whenever this view prevails, reform is
virtually impossible.

CHAPTER 14

The Common Welfare

No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far
greater part of the members are poor and miserable. It is but equity,
besides, that they who feed, cloath and lodge the whole body of the
people, should have such a share of the produce of their own labor
as to be themselves tolerably well fed, cloathed and lodged.

Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and
Causes of the Wealth of Nations.

Justice is what we want, not patronage and condescension and piti-
ful helpfulness. . . . Every one of the great schemes of social uplift
which are now so much debated by noble people amongst us is based,
when rightly conceived, upon justice, not upon benevolence. It is
based upon the right of men to breathe pure air, to live; upon the
right of women to bear children, and not to be overburdened so that
disease and breakdown will come upon them; upon the right of chil-
dren to thrive and to grow up and be strong; upon all these funda-
mental things which appeal, indeed, to our hearts, but which our
minds perceive to be part of the fundamental justice of life.

Woodrow Wilson, The New Freedom.

Two Kinds of Voluntarism

THROUGHOUT most of the first three decades of the
twentieth century organized labor, as represented by the
American Federation of Labor, was in certain respects even
more devoted to the theory of laissez faire than organized business.
Samuel Gompers could, and frequently did, denounce governmental
"intermeddling" in economic affairs with all the vehemence of a
self-made industrialist. But while businessmen were willing to employ
the machinery of government for the advancement of their own
interests, Gompers advised workingmen to abstain from the debili-

244

The Common Welfare 245

tating practice of using politics for welfare purposes. Year in and
year out, for more than a generation, he preached a new version of
the philosophy of self-help. According to his view, labor's rights
were to be secured, not by "the regulation and the discipline and
the decision" of the state, but through the organization of strong
and stable trade-unions competent to bargain with employers on a
basis of equality.

"Voluntarism," the program espoused by Gompers and other
leaders of the A.F.L., meant first of all allowing free play to "the
lawful and natural functions of the trade-union movement.,, Gompers
was by no means a doctrinaire opponent of all social legislation, but
he resented and resisted measures that, in his opinion, seemed likely
to weaken trade-unionism either by lessening the effectiveness of
collective bargaining or by obscuring the need for organization.
Maximum-hour and minimum-wage laws for adult male workers
in private employment fell in this category, as did proposals for
public health and unemployment insurance. On the other hand,
Gompers and the A.F.L. worked for laws controlling immigration,
limiting the use of injunctions in labor disputes, and offering protec-
tion to woman and child wage earners.1

Gompers' long and prominent identification with the trade-
union movement at a time when most employers were bitterly
opposed to the organization of labor led many persons to assume
that his views reflected the general attitude of American workers.
Actually, of course, Gompers spoke only for the tiny fraction of
the nation's labor force that was organized or organizable under the
terms of craft unionism. His program was frankly designed for the
benefit of this relatively small group of skilled or semiskilled work-
men; it was not intended, except indirectly, to improve the status
of the great mass of the workers; and certain of his policies, such
as opposition to eight-hour laws, were more in harmony with the
wishes of the stronger unions within the A.F.L. than of the member-
ship as a whole.2

Gompers' creed, compounded of nineteenth-century theory and
experience, was not an easy one to apply in the rapidly changing
economy of the United States in the twentieth century. Voluntarism,
a late-blooming variety of old-fashioned liberalism, seems in retrospect
to have been strangely out of place in an era of giant business
combinations, increasing mechanization of industry, large-scale immi-

Social Striving 246

gration, and open-shop employers. All these factors made collective
bargaining extremely difficult, especially for labor unions organized
on the craft basis.3 During his lifetime Gompers' dynamic personality
and his unshakable conviction of rectitude were sufficient to cover
serious defects in his program. It is more than likely that without
his resourceful leadership organized labor might have suffered even
more seriously than it did from the pommeling of the courts and the
employers' associations. Nevertheless, it is now evident that volun-
tarism had the unfortunate effect of detaching a considerable segment
of organized workmen from the reform movement, and of thereby
delaying the adoption of social measures for the prevention of
poverty.

Assertions that "the best form of charity is to give men work
and to pay them decent wages" are a commonplace of philanthropic
literature.4 In the nineteenth century it was often assumed that all
labor problems would disappear if only employers could be persuaded
voluntarily to follow this advice. Not infrequently philanthropists
sought to bolster the plea for voluntary action by stressing the
religious obligation of persons in positions of authority to deal
generously with their inferiors. As might be expected, this view
was especially prevalent among the nonemploying classes. Many
employers also endorsed it warmly; they did not always find it
convenient to put the theory into practice, but they invariably
appealed to it to justify their refusal to bargain with employees
and to explain their opposition to compulsory legislation. Although
George F. Baer, president of the Philadelphia and Reading Railway
and leading spokesman of the mine operators at the time of the
coal strike of 1902, gave the doctrine its most extreme expression,
he was by no means the only representative of capital who contended
that God had delegated exclusive responsibility for the care of
workmen to employers.5

This particular species of voluntarism was never in good repute
with organized labor, and by the first decade of the twentieth century
it was not uncommon for leading social workers and prominent
clergymen to contend that labor deserved justice rather than kind-
ness. Settlement residents were often stanch friends of the labor
movement. James B. Reynolds invited union groups to hold their meet-

The Common Welfare 247

ings in the University Settlement in New York; and Raymond Robins,
active in Chicago settlements, told delegates to the National Con-
ference of Charities and Correction that "the one main thing" they
had to do was to aid workingmen in their struggle for fair wages,
shorter hours, and security of employment.6 A speaker at the White
House Conference on the Care of Dependent Children in 1909 went
even further in his praise of the labor movement. Father William J.
White, supervisor of the Catholic Charities of Brooklyn, saluted
organized labor as "an agency for social betterment" and hailed its
achievements as contributions to the general welfare.7

These opinions contrasted sharply with the prevailing sentiment
and practice of industry, which was insistence on unilateral control
of the conditions of employment by management. In The Steel
Workers (1910), one of the six volumes of the Pittsburgh survey,
John A. Fitch made an extended study of the practical results of
this approach to the problem. Much of the book related to the
labor policies of the United States Steel Corporation, the largest
employer of labor in Pittsburgh as well as in the United States as a
whole. Those policies, which had become standard in the steel
industry and were being adopted wherever possible by other em-
ployers, led the A.F.L. in 1909 to brand the Steel Corporation the
worst enemy of organized labor in America. Fitch showed that in
the efficient, profitable, and tariff-protected process of steelmaking
wages had failed to keep pace with the increase in the cost of living,
that the level of wages in the industry was lower than it was popu-
larly believed to be, and that the earnings of skilled steelworkers
had suffered a decline in the fifteen years since unionism had been
banished from the mills.8 He also contended that the elimination of
the union had been followed by an increase in the working day.
The majority of steelworkers labored twelve hours a day; many
of them worked seven days a week, either without a full day of rest
or with a free Sunday one week followed by the "long turn"—
twenty-four hours of continuous duty— the next.9

Fitch concluded that the steel companies were taking advantage
of their unrestricted power over employees "to exact far more of
the worker than was expected of him years ago, and ... far more
than is expected now in other industries."10 One reason why they
exercised such dominance was that 60 per cent of the steelworkers

Social Striving 248

were unskilled laborers— poverty-stricken immigrants for the most
part— who had no choice but to accept employment on any terms
offered them. The other reason was that the steel companies had
perfected elaborate secret-service devices to ferret out any efforts
at unionization. Spying is justified in time of war, said Fitch. "Does
war exist in western Pennsylvania?"11

The effect of the companies' espionage systems on community
life was disastrous. "I doubt whether you could find a more suspicious
body of men than the employees of the United States Steel Corpora-
tion," Fitch commented. "They are suspicious of one another, of
their neighbors, and of their friends."12 Another investigator quoted
an old resident of the steel district as saying: "If you want to talk
in Homestead you must talk to yourself." Paul Kellogg, director of
the survey, observed that it would mean instant dismissal for large
numbers of men employed in the steel mills if they met to discuss
methods of improving their working conditions "in the way that
farmers would take up freight rates or the price of apples at a grange
hall."13 Fear and suspicion on the part of employees, censorship and
repression on the part of employers, made freedom of speech and
activity rare things in those portions of Allegheny County where
the steelworkers lived. In the opinion of the survey staff the steel
industry's frankly avowed policy of industrial dictatorship implied
denial, not only of unionism and collective bargaining, but also of
democracy itself.

The tendency of students such as Fitch and Kellogg to examine
the political as well as the economic consequences of industrial
practices was in keeping with the general trend of prewar reform.
Progressivism was primarily a political movement, stemming from
a renewed faith in democracy and expressing itself in efforts to
solve social problems by democratic political processes. Progressive
reformers were often ready to seek political remedies for industrial
ills at an earlier date than the leaders of organized labor, who, under
the sway of Gompers' voluntarism, preferred to rely mainly on
economic action. The reformers did not question the need or the
desirability of trade-union activity, but this alone did not satisfy
them. They were mindful of the great mass of America's working
people who were beyond the pale of the labor movement as it was
then organized and who lived in or on the brink of want. In their
opinion the poverty of this numerous class was the basic problem,

The Common Welfare 249

the issue that took precedence over all others. Not one but many-
strong levers must be fashioned to raise the standard of living of
the laboring poor to a level consistent with the dignity and responsi-
bility of democratic citizenship.

Social Measures for the Prevention of Poverty

Social insurance, or workingmen's insurance as it was usually
called, awakened relatively little enthusiasm in the United States
until long after it had become fairly well established abroad. A few
Americans studied and discussed German and other European experi-
ments in this field as early as the 1890's, but even those who praised
the general idea were skeptical of the possibility of introducing
workingmen's insurance into this country.14 Shortly before 1910,
however, concern over industrial accidents in the United States and
growing interest in the rapid development of European legislation
led both the Russell Sage Foundation and the United States Bureau
of Labor to prepare more detailed and informative surveys of foreign
insurance and compensation systems than had previously been avail-
able to American students.15 The publication of these authoritative
works, together with the gradual acceptance of the new view of
poverty and the emergence of the concept of preventive social work,
produced a much more favorable attitude toward workingmen's
insurance.

After 1910 the idea of preventing destitution through the
adoption of public insurance against the major causes of poverty-
accident, illness, premature death, old age, and unemployment— won
rapid approval, at least in reform circles. In 1910 Henry R. Seager
delivered a series of lectures at the New York School of Philanthropy
urging the incorporation of social insurance in the program of social
reform.16 1. M. Rubinow's Social Insurance (1913), recognized as the
standard textbook on the subject for more than twenty years, grew
out of a similar course of lectures at the same institution in 1912.
Brandeis unqualifiedly recommended the establishment in the United
States of a comprehensive system of workingmen's insurance in an

Social Striving 250

address before the 1911 meeting of the National Conference of
Charities and Correction.17 The following year a committee of the
National Conference issued a report defining the position of social
workers on contemporary economic issues. The report recommended,
in addition to a long list of other reforms, workmen's compensation
laws covering occupational diseases as well as industrial accidents,
and compulsory old-age and unemployment insurance.18 Apparently
through the influence of Paul Kellogg, all of the recommendations
contained in the report, including the insurance proposals, found
their way into the "Social and Industrial Justice" plank of the Pro-
gressive party's platform in 191 2. 19

Workmen's compensation was the first form of social insurance
to receive serious consideration in the United States. Prior to the
adoption of the compensation system Americans injured in work
accidents, unless employed by one of the few companies that had
voluntarily installed accident-insurance plans for their employees,
had no assurance that the loss and expenses occasioned by the acci-
dent would be compensated. Some received cash settlement from
their employers; some carried small industrial-insurance policies of
their own; and some were covered by the insurance programs of
trade-unions or fraternal organizations. They could, theoretically,
sue their employers for damages, but this was an uncertain, expensive,
and time-consuming process; and where the common-law rule that
the right of action for personal injury expired with the death of
the injured person was still in force, the families of men killed in
industrial accidents had no right to sue.

Under the common law an injured workman's suit for damages
against his employer might be dismissed by the judge before it
reached the jury unless the plaintiff's lawyer could prove to the
judge's satisfaction that the employer had been negligent and that
his negligence had been the proximate cause of the injury. Even if
this were established, the injured workman might still lose the suit
if it could be shown that his own or a fellow employee's negligence
had contributed to the accident or that, by continuing to work
under obviously dangerous conditions, the workman had voluntarily
assumed the risk of the accident. In the unlikely event that the
injured man was able to surmount all these obstacles and win a
favorable judgment, the case might be appealed to a higher court,

The Common Welfare 251

in which the decision might be reversed on some technical point
of law. The amount of damages received depended on the whim of
the jury. Whatever they were, a sizable portion, perhaps deservedly,
went to the lawyer who had steered the case through the shoals of
the law.20

The injustice and absurdity of some of the common-law rules
of employers' liability were recognized as early as the 1850's; by
a half century later nearly all the states had passed measures modify-
ing these doctrines in such a way as to give the injured party a
slightly better chance for success in damage suits.21 Most of the
enactments, however, applied only to accidents suffered by railway
or mineworkers, and they left many of the more serious defects
in the common-law system untouched. Recovery of damages was
still dependent on proof of the employer's negligence; and recovery
might still be denied, in most states and for the majority of workers,
through the operation of fellow-servant and contributory-negligence
principles. One careful investigator estimated that notwithstanding
the passage of employers' liability statutes, nine tenths of the eco-
nomic cost of work accidents fell upon the injured party and that
only about one fourth of the sums paid out by employers in damages
and liability premiums reached the victims of industrial accidents.22

As the inadequacy of employers' liability laws became more
evident, criticism of the whole system of requiring sufferers from
work accidents or their bereaved families to resort to suits at law
for the collection of damages became more frequent. It was argued
that it was unfair to shift the burden of the cost of accidents to
the persons who already bore the physical suffering, and— worse
than unfair— unwise, since the practice inevitably doomed large
numbers of hard-working, self-respecting families to poverty. For
families dependent on a father's daily earnings, which were usually
too small to permit of savings or adequate insurance protection, any
interruption of work, for whatever cause, meant hardship. When
cessation of work was accompanied by unusual medical and hospital
expenses, and when injury resulted, as it often did, in permanent
impairment of earning power, the results might well be calamitous.

Another frequently voiced objection was that the prevailing
system contributed to the extremely high rate of accidents in Ameri-
can industry. Employers, having little to fear from damage suits,
had no incentive to install safety measures or devices in their plants.

Social Striving 252

They were not more indifferent to suffering than employers in other
y lands, but they were under less compulsion to eliminate the hazards
of industrial employment.23

No one knew the precise number of industrial accidents occur-
ring each year in the United States, because, before the passage of the
workmen's compensation laws, some states did not require accidents
to be reported, and no state's accident statistics were entirely
reliable.24 An insurance statistician, basing his figures on the frag-
mentary data at hand, estimated that in 1913 there were 25,000 fatal
industrial accidents and 700,000 work injuries involving disability
for four weeks or longer.25 Enough was known on the subject to
convince interested students not only that the rate of fatal industrial
accidents in the United States was higher than in Europe, but also
that between one third and one half of the American fatalities were
preventable.26 "If no nation in the world rivals the United States in
the dash and energy of its business methods, no other nation is
willing to pay the price in flesh and blood of citizens," wrote Ellery
Sedgwick in a famous article entitled "The Land of Disasters." He
alleged that "accidents" that were a daily occurrence in the United
States would be impossible in countries that enforced respect for
human life. "In America things are different. Here men mind their
own business."27

Quite aside from its inhumanity "the wanton slaughter of the
toilers," as an irate journalist denominated industrial accidents, was
attacked as detrimental to the national interest.28 Writing shortly
after the Ballinger-Pinchot controversy, I. M. Rubinow observed:
"There is a problem of preservation of human resources in com-
parison with which even the coal fields of Alaska shrink into signifi-
cance."29 The strongest statement of the conservation argument came
from William Hard, who phrased his views with Rooseveltian mili-
tancy. "Every accident (and especially every unpaid-for accident)
hurts the country as well as the individual" he asserted. Uncom-
pensated industrial accidents constituted nothing less than "National
Waste," "a weakening of the Human Power of the Nation in
International Competition"; accident-prevention laws and automatic
compensation for injury, on the contrary, represented "National
Economy" and "A Saving of Physical and Financial Strength for
the World Struggle."30

Of all the books and articles dealing with the operation of the

The Common Welfare 253

employers' liability system, the most eloquent and the most effective
in promoting reform was Crystal Eastman's contribution to the
Pittsburgh survey, Work Accidents and the Law (1910). This study
reported the findings of the author's investigation of the causes
and consequences of the death or injury of about one thousand men
in work accidents in Allegheny County in the period just before
the survey was undertaken.31 Miss Eastman interviewed the injured
workmen, families of the deceased men, fellow employees, and
witnesses of the accidents; and she consulted, to the extent that she
was permitted to do so, the employers' records. Her purpose was
to ascertain the circumstances of each accident, the nature of the
injury, the worker's family responsibilities, his income, the extent
of the financial loss suffered by the worker or his family, the share
of the loss assumed by the employer, and the effect of the accident
on the economic circumstances of the worker's family. Her report
was a factual treatise, not a sentimental or propagandist^ tract, but
the sad facts themselves, skillfully marshaled and soberly stated, were
enough to give the book an impressive earnestness and to make the
author's conclusions seem irrefutable.

Miss Eastman's investigation indicated that roughly one third
of the accidents were "nobody's fault," but seemingly unavoidable
consequences of industrial production; one third resulted from "the
human weaknesses of the workmen, often accentuated by their
occupation and environment"; the other third stemmed from in-
sufficient provision for the safety of workmen on the part of
employers.32 She found that employers had provided no compensa-
tion whatsoever in more than 50 per cent of the accidents, and
that in the great majority of cases where it was provided the
compensation was so small as to cover only an insignificant part
of the income loss arising from the accident.33 As for the law of
employers' liability, Miss Eastman (who was herself an attorney)
declared: "It is to be condemned from the standpoints of justice,
method, and practical utility."34

There were two possible legal solutions to the problems de-
scribed. The common law might be further amended by abrogating
the fellow-servant rule, eliminating the doctrine of assumption of
risk, and modifying the principle of contributory negligence; or an
entirely new approach, based on European workmen's compensation
laws, might be adopted. Under the former it would still be necessary

Social Striving 254

for injured workmen or their families to sue for damages. Their
prospects for a favorable verdict would, presumably, be brighter,
but they would have no cause for action in those numerous instances
in which accidents were not the result of the employer's negligent
acts or omissions. Under the second, or compensation plan, negligence
would be disregarded. An employer would be required to compensate
all his employees injured in work accidents without regard to the
cause; and the payments he made would be determined by (and
limited to) a uniform scale of benefits, figured on the basis of a
fixed proportion of the economic loss resulting from the injury.

The advantages and disadvantages of these alternative courses
of action were examined, not only by Miss Eastman, but by the
thirty state commissions appointed to investigate industrial accidents
and employers' liability between 1909 and 1913. Miss Eastman,
weighing the relative merits of each, unhesitatingly recommended
the system of assured workmen's compensation. This was the con-
clusion ultimately reached by each of the state commissions.35 The
importance of the decision can hardly be underestimated; for the
compensation system involved a radical departure from long-estab-
lished legal principles of responsibility. Endorsement of it was another
sign of a growing willingness to alter the law to meet the needs
of modern conditions.

The underlying principle of workmen's compensation was that
accidents, whatever their cause, were an inevitable accompaniment
of the industrial process. One student sagely observed that "the
human organism is imperfectly adapted to a mechanical environ-
ment."36 Another remarked that "industrial accidents are not acci-
dents at all, but normal results of modern industry."37 Once this
premise was accepted, the logical next step was to assert that the
cost of industrial accidents, or of their prevention, was a regular
part of the cost of production. Like any other cost it should be
borne, in the first instance, by the producer of the goods, and
ultimately by the consumer. Supporters of the plan believed that
employers would desire to keep the expenses incurred by the opera-
tion of the compensation system at a minimum and that they would
therefore bestir themselves to reduce the number of avoidable
accidents— perhaps even find ways to eliminate supposedly unavoidable
ones. When it was objected that if compensation for injuries were

The Common Welfare 255

assured, workingmen might become more careless, Miss Eastman
replied: "If the fear of death or injury does not insure caution in
the workman, we cannot hope to instill it by holding over him the
fear of poverty."38

During the decade after 1910 the movement made such rapid
headway that by 1920 all but six states and the District of Columbia
had enacted compensation statutes of one sort or another. "No other
kind of labor legislation gained such general acceptance in so brief
a period," declared one historian of the movement.39 The rapidity
with which state after state adopted the compensation principle
surprised even the most sanguine reformers. Compensation laws,
although not always of the same type or for the same reason, were
supported by organizations as diverse in their aims and composition
as the American Association for Labor Legislation and the National
Association of Manufacturers.40 Organized labor, which had at first
indicated a preference for stronger employers' liability laws and had
opposed some of the early compensation statutes, soon renounced its
hostility; and after study of the operation of the approximately
twenty workmen's compensation laws in effect at the close of 1913
the A.F.L. gave its official sanction to the movement.41

Workmen's compensation laws did not bring about the quick
reduction in the frequency of work accidents that supporters of
the movement had hoped would follow their enactment. Other
factors, such as the increasing scale, speed, and complexity of
industrial operations, combined to keep the rate of accidents at a
high level.42 Nevertheless, the adoption of the system did have the
result of providing the nation with its first detailed and exact
knowledge of the nature and extent of industrial fatalities and injuries.
Heretofore estimates of the number of casualties were apt to vary
according to the attitudes of statisticians toward the seriousness of
the question, and it was always possible to deny the validity of those
estimates that placed the annual toll of life and limb at an alarmingly
high figure. With the regular collection and publication of accident
statistics by state compensation agencies it became more and more
difficult to doubt the gravity of the problem.43

The major defects of the compensation laws passed between
1910 and 1920 were that they left a substantial proportion of workers
outside their coverage, usually failed to include occupational diseases
among the compensable injuries, and in no instance provided an

Social Striving 256

adequate scale of compensation benefits. The majority of the laws
were of a voluntary type, meaning that employers, if they chose
to do so, might remain outside the system. In practice few of them
"elected out," but the privilege of withdrawing retained by employers
acted as a brake on movements to raise the compensation scales.
There was always a possibility that if benefits were increased, large
numbers of employers might exercise their right of withdrawal.44

Most if not all of the acts specifically excluded certain occu-
pations, typically agricultural labor and domestic service. Some
statutes exempted small employers— that is, those employing fewer
than ten, eleven, sixteen, or whatever number of workmen was
stated in the act; a few were limited to "hazardous employments."
As a consequence of such exemptions and exclusions an estimated
30 per cent of the workers in the states with compensation laws
remained outside the system in 1920.45

At the time the original compensation laws were passed com-
paratively little was known about industrial medicine or hygiene.
The research of Dr. Alice Hamilton, John B. Andrews, and Frederick
L. Hoffman and the interest displayed by two government officials,
Charles P. Neill and Royal Meeker, in promoting research and
publicizing the facts about trade diseases did much to dispel the
ignorance of both the public and employers. By 1920 a few of the
more enlightened states had brought occupational diseases under the
purview of the compensation laws, but it was not until the late
1930's that all of the important industrial states took this step.46

The most serious weakness of the laws was that the scale of
benefits was too miserly to meet the loss suffered by victims of
industrial accidents. A well-informed critic pointed out in 1924 that
in most states the money benefits were insufficient to maintain a
normal standard of living during the compensation period and that
these payments were abruptly terminated at the end of an arbitrarily
determined time limit "without regard to the needs of the injured
worker or of those dependent upon him." He found that the medical
benefits were inadequate either to relieve the suffering or to restore
the earning capacity of severely injured workers. Consequently, and
in complete violation of the assumed principle of the compensation
system, the victims of industrial accidents still bore the heaviest
share of the wage loss resulting from work injuries.47

This result may not have been entirely unforeseen or unintended

The Common Welfare 257

by some of the more influential supporters of the compensation laws,
as contrasted with the compensation principle. Writing in the midst
of the campaign for the adoption of the laws, Rubinow noted that
business groups commonly advocated legislation that would make
compensation cheap and at the same time relieve employers of the
risk and annoyance of liability suits. It was the limited compensation
scale, rather than the assurance that all work injuries would be
compensated, that recommended the measures to employers.48

Despite recognized imperfections in the compensation laws,
progressives interpreted their enactment as heartening evidence of
popular support for the idea of social insurance. The acceptance in
theory, if not yet in fact, of collective responsibility for the wage
loss resulting from industrial accidents seemed to presage similar
action in other fields. Injury at work was only one of the hazards
to which wage earners were exposed and with which, as individuals,
they were powerless to cope. Income losses occasioned by sickness,
unemployment, and old age might be dealt with in much the same
way as those stemming from accident. If this were done, said the
reformers, society would have protected itself against the major
social causes of poverty.

"There are more accidents, more sickness, more premature old
age and invalidity, and more unemployment in the United States than
in most European countries," wrote one of the leading advocates of
social insurance in 191 3. 49 Formerly Americans had assumed that the
economic condition of labor was prosperous enough to permit indi-
viduals to surmount the financial crises produced by these calamities.
Wage and budget studies undertaken since the turn of the century,
however, had confirmed what social workers had long suspected:
that few wage earners ever rose far above the poverty line, that
surpluses in their budgets were rare, and that without some sort of
assistance they were economically unable to meet the drain of disaster
without extreme hardship. For a century Americans had been perfect-
ing systems of relief to meet need after its occurrence. Now the time
seemed to be ripe to prevent destitution and the need for charitable
relief by attacking the problem at— or nearer— its source.

Practically all the arguments for accident compensation applied
with equal or greater force to sickness insurance. To the general
proposition that the primary concern of the state should be the

Social Strwing 258

physical well-being of its citizens there was added the known fact
that illness was a more important cause of poverty than industrial
accident. Like most of the other tribulations of life, sickness struck
the poor more frequently than the well-to-do. This was true not
only because the poor were more numerous than the well-to-do,
but also because their bad housing, improper diet, strenuous labor in
adverse surroundings, and inability to obtain regular medical attention
made the poorer classes more susceptible to the attacks of disease.
Theodore Parker once reflected that rich men of old rode into battle
so well covered with armor that arrows glanced from them as from
stone, whereas the poor confronted war in leather jerkins, and every
weapon tore their unprotected flesh. "In the modern, perennial battle
with disease," said Parker, "the same thing takes place: the Poor fall
and die."50

Even ignoring the anxiety and suffering it caused, prolonged ill-
ness brought a train of misery when it invaded the homes of the
poor. Not infrequently it cut off income; in any event it diverted
into other channels money sorely needed for the everyday expenses
of running a household. The advent of sickness did not reduce every
low-income family or even most, to destitution; usually they were
able to get through the ordeal without asking for or receiving aid
from sources outside their own kith and kin. They managed some-
how—and often this meant by resorting to questionable economies
in housing, nutrition, health, education, and recreation and by relying
on the ill-compensated and unnatural labor of wives and young
children. But the decay of strength, the deterioration of living
standards, and the disruption of normal family life did not affect
only those homes in which the unwelcome visitor stalked. Sickness
had economic consequences that were scarcely less blighting to
society than to the immediate families involved. Each year illness, to
a greater extent than any other single factor, either directly or
indirectly drafted hapless persons into the already overflowing ranks
of "the army of the disheartened and ineffective."51 It was this class
of casual, unskilled, standardless— and therefore low-paid— labor that
comprised the hard core of the poverty problem.

"What next in reform?" asked a group of social workers at a
meeting held in 1915. Health insurance was the unanimous reply.
The group contained some formidable and experienced crusaders.
Jane Addams had been in the forefront of nearly every movement

The Common Welfare 259

for social betterment for a quarter of a century; Paul Kellogg had
directed the Pittsburgh survey and was editor of the influential
magazine The Survey; Edward T. Devine was the best-known
administrator and educator in the field of social work; John B.
Andrews, secretary of the American Association for Labor Legisla-
tion, had played a leading role in the securing of workmen's compen-
sation laws; and I. M. Rubinow was the nation's outstanding authority
on social insurance. When these men and women promulgated the
slogan "Health Insurance— the next step" all signs seemed to promise
early victory. In addition to the precedent established by the recent
passage of accident compensation laws there was, or seemed to be,
mounting interest in the elimination of occupational diseases and in
the reduction of infant mortality. Furthermore, earlier campaigns for
the prevention of tuberculosis and for the control of hookworm
infection had received enthusiastic public support.

Those high hopes were soon dashed by the unexpectedly bitter
and widespread opposition that the very suggestion of the establish-
ment of a system of compulsory health insurance provoked. Nearly
twenty years later one of the sponsors of the movement concluded
that the chief reason for its collapse was that he and other advocates
of "the next step" had failed to recognize the variety and strength
of the class interests that would be antagonized by the proposal.52
These included employers' and taxpayers' associations, insurance
firms, organized labor (until the 1930's), members of the medical
and dental professions, druggists, producers and dispensers of patent
medicines, and Christian Scientists. The success with which such
groups employed ideological arguments against public health insur-
ance revealed that, despite the adoption of accident compensation,
the notion of individual responsibility for misfortune was still deeply
rooted in the public mind. Eventually opponents of compulsory
health insurance were able to banish consideration of need or desir-
ability from debate on the issue and to substitute emotional appeals
to patriotism for rational argumentation. When the depression era
brought a revival of interest in reform, it was unemployment and
old-age insurance, not health insurance, that seemed the logical next
steps toward security.

CONCLUSION

The Price of Reform

In a few years all our restless and angry hearts will be quiet in
death, but those who come after us will live in the world which our
sins have blighted or which our love of right has redeemed. Let us do
our thinking on these great questions, not with our eyes fixed on our
bank account, but with a wise outlook on the fields of the future
and with consciousness that the spirit of the Eternal is seeking to
distil from our lives some essence of righteousness before they pass
away.

Walter Rauschenbusch, Christianity and the
Social Crisis.

THE eclipse of reform in the 1920's did not signify any weaken-
ing of the national faith in the possibility of overcoming poverty.
On the contrary, it reflected the widespread assumption that
for all practical purposes the task had been accomplished. According
to the prevailing view poverty, like child labor, was virtually a thing
of the past; consequently there was no longer any need or justifica-
tion for social reform. By inference, individual reform was likewise
outdated, since the most important elements in prosperity were now
held to be impersonal factors such as technology and scientific
management. Conservatives boasted that under the amiable relations
established between government and big business in the Harding
and Coolidge administrations the American dream of material abun-
dance was fast being realized. During the campaign of 1928 Herbert
Hoover referred to the automatic solution of social problems by
business processes as "our American experiment in human welfare."
He cited the progress made in the preceding seven years as proof
that this experiment had brought the United States "nearer to the
abolition of poverty, to the abolition of the fear of want, than
humanity has ever reached before."1

260

The Price of Reform 261

Well before the stock market crash of 1929 Hoover's critics
pointed out that his optimistic view of the state of the economy was
based on a rather strained reading of the evidence.2 It was not until
many months after the crash, however, that either Hoover or the
nation as a whole acknowledged the full extent and seriousness of
the economic debacle. By that time "the abolition of poverty, the
abolition of the fear of want" had become in a very real sense the
major concern of the American people. The Hoover administration
then undertook such measures to promote recovery as were consistent
with the President's philosophy of government. Even so, the Admin-
istration retained the outlook of the 1920's and, as Franklin D. Roose-
velt observed, the program it adopted to meet the emergency delayed
relief and neglected reform. Very early in the 1930's the majority of
the voters made it plain that they expected their government to take
more drastic action to combat the depression than Hoover believed
warranted. Before the decade was over the voters had repeatedly
expressed their confidence in a new administration, which was as
firmly committed to reform as to recovery, and which recognized
more clearly than any previous one that the basic faults in the
economy were insecurity, insufficient income, and low standards of
living.

If, as has recently been suggested, the advent of the New Deal
marked "a drastic new departure" in the history of American reform,
the reason is only partly because the Roosevelt administration took
office in the midst of the worst depression in American history.3
Equally important is the fact that the President and his major advisers,
influenced in some degree by the intellectual revolution that had
occurred since the 1890's, pressed experts in many lines of endeavor
into government service and consciously sought to apply the new
trends in social and economic thought to the issues of the day. This
was especially true in the fields of welfare and social legislation, in
both of which the New Deal drew heavily upon the knowledge of
social workers. Without minimizing the importance of the social
reforms inaugurated during the 1930's it may be said that the measures
then adopted were largely implementations, amplifications, and— in
some instances— but partial fulfillments of the program of preventive
social work formulated before World War I.

One of the principles that the profession of social work had
inherited from the scientific philanthropy of the late nineteenth

Social Striving 262

century was hostility to public outdoor relief. The founders of the
profession all believed that private charity should provide for the
needy who did not require institutional care. This assumption regu-
larly broke down when put to severe test in time of major disaster
or depression; but, although the idea of voluntary responsibility for
relief was not so vehemently asserted in the twenties as formerly, it
was not seriously challenged before 1930. In the next two or three
years, however, as social workers struggled with mounting case loads
and diminishing revenues, they rapidly lost any lingering aversion
they may have felt toward "official assistance." By 1931 some of
them were taking the position that unemployment relief could no
longer be regarded as a form of charity but should be recognized as
a public obligation to which the jobless were entitled as a matter
of right. When the resources of the local communities were exhausted
—or at any rate were no longer forthcoming— social workers did not
hesitate to call upon first the states and then the national government
to supply additional funds for emergency relief.4

The question of federal participation in relief was no longer
at issue when Franklin Roosevelt became president because, under a
program reluctantly approved by Hoover in the summer of 1932,
federal loans (which it was commonly assumed would never be
repaid) were already financing 80 per cent of all state and local aid
to the unemployed.5 The problem that remained to be settled was
how the federal funds should be administered, and, in particular,
whether they should be used for cash or work relief. In the first year
and a half of the New Deal the Administration tried both approaches
but tended to rely on the former, mainly because that course seemed
to arouse least controversy. Not until after the Democratic victories
in the congressional elections of 1934 did President Roosevelt come
out strongly in favor of work as opposed to cash relief. His message
to Congress of January 4, 1935, which proposed establishment of
the Works Progress Administration, denounced public assistance in
the form of money and food in language reminiscent of that used
by the scientific philanthropists of the 1870's and 1880's:

The lessons of history, confirmed by the evidence immediately be-
fore me, show conclusively that continued dependence upon relief
induces a spiritual and moral disintegration fundamentally destruc-
tive to the national fiber. To dole out relief in this way is to admin-
ister a narcotic, a subtle destroyer of the human spirit. It is inimical

The Price of Reform 263

to the dictates of sound policy. It is in violation of the traditions of
America.6

Nineteenth-century crusaders against pauperism could scarcely
have objected to the President's pronouncement "Work must be
found for able-bodied but destitute workers." They would have
been in complete sympathy with his assertion that not only the
bodies, but the self-reliance, courage, and determination of the
unemployed must be preserved from destruction. Joseph Tuckerman,
Robert Hartley, Josephine Shaw Lowell, and all the earlier charity
reformers would have agreed that those precious qualities deserved
to be protected at any price. It is quite possible, however, that they
would have been very surprised to discover how high, in monetary
terms, that price would prove to be. In the case of WPA, the total
cost of providing work— and with it, self-respect, hope, and patriotism
—to an average of about 2,000,000 persons a month for six years
amounted to $11,365,000,000.

In the same message that recommended creation of the WPA
President Roosevelt declared that the time had come for action by
the national government in the field of social security; two weeks
later he submitted to Congress the plan for old-age and unemploy-
ment insurance prepared by his Committee on Economic Security.
As already noted, support for social insurance had been building up
in reform circles since 1910. Under the impact of the depression two
of the major barriers that had previously impeded progress in this
area— public indifference and the hostility of organized labor-
rapidly broke down. By the end of 1934 the movement for public
insurance, once largely confined to humanitarians and educators, and
regarded mainly as a method of preventing poverty, had been broad-
ened and made more militant by the enlistment in the cause of
millions of unhappy and disgruntled people. Most of the new
recruits were already in or desperately close to poverty and they
looked upon old-age pensions and unemployment insurance as
panaceas both for their own and the nation's ills. In these circum-
stances the President advised against attempts to apply social insur-
ance on too ambitious a scale at the start, and warned that "extrava-
gant action" might jeopardize the whole idea of social security.

During the seven months that the modest and moderate social
security bill backed by President Roosevelt was before Congress,
it was attacked as often from the left as from the right. Apprehension

Social Striving 264

that rejection of the Administration measure might lead to increased
public pressure for the passage of more sweeping proposals appears
to have been an important factor in weakening conservative opposi-
tion to the bill and in bringing about its enactment.7 As finally
adopted the Social Security Act provided for a national program
of old-age insurance supported by contributions from employers and
employees, and for unemployment-insurance systems to be operated
by the states but financed by a federal pay-roll tax. In addition, the
Act authorized grants-in-aid to the states for old-age pensions, and
made available further federal subsidies for a variety of public-health
and welfare projects affecting mothers, dependent and neglected
children, handicapped persons, and the blind. It contained no pro-
vision for insurance against sickness, for aid to the unemployed after
the period of insurance coverage had expired, or for federal participa-
tion in the relief of distress caused by a multitude of other causes.

A dozen years after the passage of the Social Security Act a
prominent social worker commented that in view of the items
omitted from it, the measure might well have been entitled an act
to furnish such means of security as provoked no serious opposition.8
These deficiencies (which were recognized in 1935 but have not yet
been corrected) in no wise lessen the significance of the Social
Security Act as one of the milestones in the history of American
social reform. The Act has brought about an expansion of public-
welfare activities all over the country; it has raised the standards of
welfare work and improved the legal status of applicants for certain
kinds of assistance; it has opened the way for the development of
a long-delayed and much-needed national policy on public welfare;
and— not least— it has been declared constitutional.

On May 24, 1937— the very same day, as it happened, that the
Supreme Court rendered its decisions upholding the constitutionality
of the Social Security Act— the President charged Congress to "ex-
tend the frontiers of social progress" by adopting a minimum-wage
and maximum-hour law. Until two months earlier the Supreme
Court had denied even the states the right to establish minimum
wages; and until April, 1937, the majority of the justices had fol-
lowed such a narrow interpretation of interstate commerce that the
validity of any regulation of labor conditions by the national govern-
ment was extremely doubtful. The Court had reversed its position
on both points, however, by the time the President sent his message

The Price of Reform 265

to Congress. Enactment of federal legislation on wages, hours, and
child labor was therefore constitutionally feasible. Nevertheless, so
many other objections from conservative and labor groups still had
to be overcome that it was only after a full year of debate and
compromise that Congress was induced to accept a Fair Labor
Standards Act providing, at the start, and in those activities not
exempted from its protection, for a minimum wage of twenty-five
cents an hour, a maximum work week of forty-four hours, and
prohibition of the shipment in interstate commerce of goods produced
by children under sixteen years of age.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the long debate was the
tendency of President Roosevelt and other supporters of the bill to
lay as much stress on its economic as on its humanitarian objectives.
The latter had been the major consideration of earlier reformers,
but from the start, and especially after the recession of late 1937,
the President emphasized the need for raising the income and
stimulating the buying power of workers in all sections of the
country. Thus, somewhat ironically, the kind of legislation that had
always before been attacked because of its possible adverse effects
on the economy was now presented and accepted as essential to
sound and lasting prosperity.

Although the New Dealers faced far more difficult problems
than their immediate predecessors in reform they were no less
confident than the Progressives that the economic and environmental
causes of poverty could be eradicated. In the darkest days of the
depression they were sustained by the same faith in American abun-
dance that had characterized the humanitarians of the preceding
generation. "I see one third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-
nourished," said President Roosevelt in his second inaugural address
—but he hastened to add that the vision did not make him despair;
for he also saw "a great nation, upon a great continent, blessed with
a wealth of natural resources," which was fully capable of trans-
lating national wealth "into a spreading volume of human comforts
hitherto unknown," and of raising the lowest standards of living
high above the subsistence level.9

Earlier reformers and their conservative critics had sometimes
suggested that the task of making fundamental improvements in the
income and living conditions of the masses might be beyond the
ability of capitalism. If this doubt ever assailed the New Dealers it

Social Striving 266

did not appear in their actions. Confronted with the heavy respon-
sibility of restoring the national economy to working order, President
Roosevelt and his coworkers assumed, and in large measure proved,
that an invigorated democracy and an enlightened capitalism could
provide security and welfare for all.

For more than half a century we have known that the most
valuable philanthropic work is the preventive, not the curative, and
that the best way to deal with distress is to make the normal environ-
ment of life such that misfortunes, when they occur, will not find
large numbers of people economically defenseless. This approach to
reform is seldom challenged in principle. Nevertheless, as the pre-
ceding chapters show, attempts to put it into practice are always
opposed, usually derided, and sometimes defeated. Whenever an
effort is made to apply the doctrine of prevention to a specific social
problem the cry goes up that the proposed remedy is socialistic,
un-American, unconstitutional, untimely, a violation of economic
law, and contrary to human nature. All or some of these charges
may be true, but they are not the central reasons why reforms that
seek to prevent distress rather than to palliate it are adopted slowly
and in the face of bitter opposition. The real reasons are that pre-
vention is expensive and that it interferes with somebody's rights or
liberties.

It costs money to manufacture goods, to raise crops, to transport
freight across the country, to dig minerals from the earth, and to
perform all the other operations necessary to a flourishing economy.
So, too, it costs to produce healthy, skilled, happy, and law-
abiding citizens— more than most people realize, more than some
are willing to pay. An adequate program for the prevention of
distress is bound to be an expensive proposition. This is true whether
the distress be caused by unemployment, illness, low earning power,
or some natural disaster such as flood. Relief is also expensive, and
so is neglect. But there are experts who can compute the money cost
of prevention; they can tell the taxpayer almost to a fraction of a
cent what his share of the burden will be; and dollars and cents are
the terms in which we ordinarily figure expense. Expenditures for
relief and charity, although they can be estimated with fair ac-
curacy from year to year and always amount to a very sizable sum,

The Price of Reform 267

do not loom so large as those for prevention. The cost of neglect,
including the waste, inefficiency, and disorder it creates, is so astron-
omical that it can scarcely be reckoned. This cost is one that we
have never yet fully appreciated.

The second major objection to preventive remedies, the assertion
that they will interfere with individual liberties, is no less and no
more valid than the argument of expense. The chief liberties endan-
gered by preventive social action are the supposed rights to profit
or otherwise benefit from practices that may be advantageous to
some individuals but are harmful to society. Depriving the strong
of the power to take advantage of the weak is sure to be resisted by
those who are strong and powerful. No doubt such deprivation is
a violation of natural conditions; but it is also the essence of justice.

It is assumed by some that the chief threat to individual freedom
comes from the state. In many times and places this has been and
is still true. It is not true, or at least it is much less often true, in
nations with free and democratic political institutions. There are a
great many areas of life in which the absence of state or social
controls means not freedom, but subjection to the most galling of
tyrannies. Liberty, after all, is a practical matter, not an abstraction.
Men can be victimized as much by the economic law of supply and
demand as by the arbitrary whim of a despot.

There is still a rather widespread belief that state interference
in economic matters and the assumption by the state of responsibility
for activities formerly performed by individuals for their private
profit are signs of decay. The broadening of the regulatory and
service functions of the state may more properly be diagnosed as
the mark of a healthy social life. Certainly it is not a revolutionary
development, but a continuation of a long, historical process. Not in
some vague state of nature, but in fairly recent times, even such
matters as the gathering of taxes, the recruitment of armies, and the
administration of criminal law fell within the province of private
enterprise. It is not paternalism that men are establishing when, by
common consent, they assign new functions to their government.
On the contrary, their action is a rejection of the paternalistic author-
ity previously exercised by private individuals; it is a substitution of
democratic for dictatorial control over the material conditions of
their lives.

Social Striving 268

The promise of America, both to its own and to other peoples,
has always been the pledge of improved material conditions of life.
Once the United States itself, by offering unique opportunities for
individual advancement, seemed the world's best cure for poverty.
Now we are hopeful that through the export of American capital
and technical knowledge to less-favored areas of the globe we can
enable depressed peoples to overcome their ancient need. The inter-
national tensions of the present give the new program the same
urgency formerly held by projects to improve the lot of the "dan-
gerous classes" at home.

As we embark on this difficult venture it is important for us to
remember that American progress in the field of welfare has been
obtained not so much by the encouragement of charity as by the
promotion of measures that have reduced the necessity for it. We
now know that the economic ills from which men surfer are not
entirely of their own making, that hunger and disease cannot be
exorcised by moral exhortations, and that there is no cheap remedy
for poverty. We have found out that the price of reform, for society
as for the individual, is not only a resolution to give up bad habits,
but conscious, intelligent striving to lead a better life.

In our own country the discovery of poverty brought with it a
rediscovery of the brotherhood of man. The lesson that we have
learned as a result of our attempts to deal with poverty at home is
the need for respect, kindness, cooperation, and justice in relations
between men. Further concrete demonstrations of our belief in the
dignity and supreme value of human life are as indispensable to a
program of international aid as loans and technical guidance. National
self-interest, hostility to communism, and sympathy for the orphaned
and widowed are not sufficient foundations on which to erect a
permanent program for combating want in the world. Unless and
until our assistance is motivated by a genuine feeling of respect for
the essential spiritual worth of all human beings, regardless of their
present condition, the results will be disappointing to us and humiliat-
ing to those we try to help.

A Note on the Sources

Sources for a study of American attitudes toward poverty are
abundant, varied, and accessible. There are many approaches to the
topic and, out of the vast literature bearing on the subject, the
individual researcher must select those works that strike him as most
representative and pertinent. The particular sources I have used for
specific phases of the problem are indicated in notes for each chap-
ter, and the major works consulted in the preparation of this book
are listed in the Bibliography. I have not thought it desirable to
divide and subdivide the Bibliography into numerous classifications,
but I should like to call the reader's attention to certain works that
have proved unusually helpful.

Owing to the nature of the inquiry I have relied mainly on
printed works, but Mr. J. G. Phelps Stokes of New York kindly
put at my disposal his large collection of correspondence and papers
dealing with charitable and reform activities since the 1890's. I have
also utilized various unpublished reports in the archives of the Com-
munity Service Society of New York. I found some uncatalogued
material on "Poor" in the New York Public Library Annex, and
certain nineteenth-century pamphlets not readily obtainable elsewhere
in the Newberry Library in Chicago.

My basic sources were the writings of humanitarian reformers
such as Joseph Tuckerman, Robert M. Hartley, Charles Loring
Brace, Josephine Shaw Lowell, Amos G. Warner, Jane Addams,
Jacob Riis, Edward T. Devine, Robert Hunter, John A. Ryan, and
Florence Kelley. In addition to the well-known books of Miss
Addams and Riis the key works in this category include Brace's
Dangerous Classes of New York, Mrs. Lowell's Public Relief and

269

Social Striving 270

Private Charity, Warner's American Charities, and Hunter's Poverty.
There are worth-while studies of the life and work of Tuckerman
by McColgan, of Mrs. Lowell by Stewart, and of Mrs. Kelley by
Goldmark. Special aspects of nineteenth-century philanthropy are
dealt with in Brackett's Supervision and Education in Charities and
Folks's Care of Destitute, Neglected and Delinquent Children. Wat-
son's Charity Organization Movement in the United States traces
the development of scientific philanthropy and includes a very com-
prehensive bibliography on the subject. Devine's When Social Work
Was Young gives a good picture of the rise of preventive social work.

The Proceedings of the National Conference of Social Work
(formerly the National Conference of Charities and Correction)
contain many articles and discussions of interest to the historian;
Frank J. Bruno's Trends in Social Work is a handy and informative
guide to the Proceedings. The Survey and its predecessors, Charities
and the Commons and Charities, are among the best and most readily
available sources of information on social-reform movements. The
pamphlets issued by groups such as the National Child Labor Com-
mittee and the Consumers' League shed light on social conditions
and also communicate the spirit of the reformers to sympathetic
readers. The annual reports of philanthropic organizations frequently
summarize the findings of studies conducted by charity agents. A
good example is Owen's "The Story of the 'Big Flat,' " in the
Forty-third Annual Report of the New York A.I.C.P.

Certain major investigations undertaken by both voluntary or-
ganizations and governmental agencies in the first two decades of
the twentieth century are landmarks in the history of social research.
Perhaps the most important of these are Kellogg's The Pittsburgh
Survey (particularly the volumes by Crystal Eastman and John A.
Fitch), De Forest's and Veiller's The Tenement House Problem,
and the U.S. Bureau of Labor's Report on Condition of Woman and
Child Wage-Earners. Nearly all the studies published by the Russell
Sage Foundation and the Charities Publication Committee can be
used with profit by the historian; and scholarly journals such as The
Annals and the Publications of the American Economic Association
are studded with articles on important issues.

One of the most enjoyable and rewarding phases of my task
was to go through the files of magazines such as The Arena, Atlantic
Monthly, Masses, The Craftsman, The Forum, Harper's Weekly,

A Note on the Sources 271

Life, North American Review, Outlook, and Scribnefs, all of which
contain useful material in the form of articles, fiction, or illustrations.
I found it illuminating to contrast the series on "The Poor in Great
Cities" appearing in Scribner's in 1892 with the "Conquest of Pov-
erty" articles published in the Metropolitan Magazine in 1910-11.
Revealing insights into attitudes toward poverty can also be obtained
from popular novels. Although the list could be extended almost
indefinitely, works on the order of Smith's The Neivsboy, Eggles-
ton's The Hoosier Schoolmaster, Dowling's The Wreckers, and
Rice's Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch proved especially informa-
tive. The Cry for Justice, edited by Upton Sinclair, is an anthology
that permits a rapid survey of the literature of social protest.

Frequent reference to certain general works is necessary when
one undertakes a study of this kind. I found the essays and bibliog-
raphies in the Literary History of the United States, Egbert's and
Persons' Socialism and American Life, and Persons' Evolutionary
Thought in America of particular help. Larkin's Art and Life in
America, Baur's Revolution and Tradition in American Art, and
Davidson's Life in America helped me greatly in preparing the
chapters on art; and Volume III of The History of Labor in the
United States by Commons, et ah, was indispensable in the later
stages of the investigation. The volumes by Nevins, Schlesinger, and
Faulkner in The History of American Life series remain the best
starting points for research on numerous topics in social history; and
the findings of more recent scholarship are ably presented in Link's
American Epoch and Woodrow Wilson and the Progressive Era.

Notes

CHAPTER 1

The Problem Emerges

1John H. Griscom, The Sanitary
Condition of the Laboring Popula-
tion of New York with Suggestions
for its Improvement (New York,
1845), pp. 5 and 9.

2 William Ellery Charming, "On the
Elevation of the Laboring Classes"
in The Works of William E. Chan-
ning, D.D. (Boston, 1889), p. 60.

3 Elizabeth Oakes Smith, The News-
boy (New York, 1854), p. 88.

4 Charles Dickens, American Notes
in The Works of Charles Dickens
(National Library Edition. 20 vols.,
New York, n. d.), XIV, 115-16.

5 Robert Hartley, Eighth Annual Re-
port of the New York Association
for Improving the Condition of the
Poor, 1851, p. 18.

6 Matthew Hale Smith, Sunshine and
Shadow in New York (Hartford,
1869), p. 366.

7 Josiah Strong, The New Era or the
Coming Kingdom (New York,
1893), p. 193.

8 United States Commissioner of La-
bor, Seventh Special Report, The
Slums of Baltimore, Chicago, New
York and Philadelphia (Washing-
ton, 1894), p. 13.

9 Charles Loring Brace, The Danger-
ous Classes of New York and
Twenty Years' Work Among Them
(New York, 1872), p. 31.

10 New York Association for Improv-
ing the Condition of the Poor,

First Report of a Committee on
the Sanitary Condition of the La-
boring Classes in the City of New
York, with Remedial Suggestions
(New York, 1853), p. 4.
""Tenement Houses — Their
Wrongs," New York Daily Tri-
bune, Nov. 23, 1864, p. 4.

12 New York A.I.C.P., First Report
of a Committee on the Sanitary
Condition of the Laboring Classes,
p. 4.

13 George C. Booth in Forty-First
Annual Report of the New York
A.I.C.P., 1884, pp. 50-53.

14 Chicago American, June 13, 1835,
quoted in James Brown, The His-
tory of Public Assistance in Chi-
cago, 1833 to 1893 (Chicago, 1941),
p. 12.

15 Aaron Clark, quoted in David M.
Schneider, The History of Public
Welfare in New York State, 1609-
1866 (Chicago, 1938), p. 299.

16 Edith Abbott, Historical Aspects
of the Immigration Problem. Select
Documents (Chicago, 1926), pp.
559-694 contain numerous protests
and complaints against the impor-
tation of alien pauperism and crime.

17 Schneider, The History of Public
Welfare in New York State, pp.
297-98.

18 Ray Allen Billington, The Protes-
tant Crusade, 1800-1860 (New York,
1938), pp. 35 and 324.

272

Notes

273

19 Schneider, The History of Public
Welfare in New York State, p. 126;
see also pp. 296-97. The whole prob-
lem is discussed in Oscar Handlin,
The Uprooted. The Epic Story of
the Great Migrations That Made
the American People (Boston, 1952),
pp. 30-93.

20 Ferris Greenslet, Thomas Bailey
Aldrich (Boston, 1928), pp. 168-69.

"Washington Gladden, "The Prob-
lem of Poverty," The Century,
XLV (1892-93), 253; and Jacob A.
Riis, "Special Needs of the Poor
in New York," The Forum, XIV
(1892-93), 492.

22 Gladden, op. cit., p. 253.

23 John R. Commons, Social Reform
and the Church (New York, 1894),
p. 31.

24 For an analysis of Brownson's views
see Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.,
Orestes A. Br owns on, A Pilgrim! s
Progress (Boston, 1939), pp. 89-111.

25 Quoted in Foster Rhea Dulles, La-
bor in America. A History (New
York, 1949), p. 75.

26 George T. Dowling, The Wreck-
ers: A Social Study (Philadelphia
1886), p. 209.

27 Charles Dudley Warner, Fashions
in Literature and Other Social Es-
says and Addresses (New York,
1902), pp. 170 and 176.

28 James Cardinal Gibbons, "Wealth
and Its Obligations," North Ameri-
can Review, CLII (1891), 393. Cf.
General William Booth, In Darkest
England and the Way Out (Lon-
don, 1890), pp. 19-20.

29 Lilian Brandt, Growth and Devel-

opment of A1CP and COS (A
Preliminary and Exploratory Re-
view) (New York, 1942), p. 116.

30 W. S. Rainsford, The Story of a
Varied Life (New York, 1922), p.
305.

31 Samuel Rezneck, "The Depression
of 1819-1822, A Social History,"
The American Historical Review,
XXXIX (1933-34), 32.

32 Harold Frances Williamson, Ed-
ward Atkinson, The Biography of
an American Liberal, 1827-1905
(Boston, 1934), pp. 269-72.

33 This point is made by Commons in
Social Reform and the Church, p. 7.

34 Strong, The New Era, pp. 137-38
and 141.

35 Quoted in Samuel Rezneck, "The
Social History of an American De-
pression, 1837-1843," The American
Historical Review, XL (1934-35),
662.

36 William T. Stead, If Christ Came
to Chicago (London, 1894), p. 7,
quoting a Chicago newspaper.

37 Rezneck, "Social History of an
American Depression, 1837-1843,"
667; Commons, Social Reform and
the Church, p. 38; and Leah Han-
nah Feder, Unemployment Relief
in Periods of Depression (New
York, 1936), p. 76.

38 Quoted in Rezneck, "Social History
of an American Depression, 1837-
1843," p. 666.

39 Helen Campbell, "Prisoners of Pov-
erty. Women Wage- Workers. Their
Trades and Their Lives," New
York Daily Tribune, October 24,
1886, p. 13.

CHAPTER 2

Shifting Attitudes

1 Eugene Lawrence, "The New Year
—The Poor," Harper's Weekly,
XXVIII (1884), 35.

The contribution of religion to the
reform philosophy of the 1830's and
1840's is discussed in Merle Curti,

Notes

274

The Growth of American Thought
(New York, 1943), pp. 380-82. On
the influence of William Ellery
Channing and Unitarianism on the
"philanthropic renaissance" of the
decade 1830-40 see Francis G.
Peabody, "Unitarianism and Philan-
thropy," The Charities Review, V
(1895-96), 25-26. Channing's views
on the cause and cure of poverty
are outlined in "On the Elevation
of the Laboring Classes," The
Works of William E. Channing,
D.D. (Boston, 1889), pp. 58-60.
There are interesting comments on
the general problem of the relation-
ship of religion to philanthropy in
Henry Bradford Washburn, The
Religious Motive in Philanthropy
(Philadelphia, 1931), pp. 7-8 and
172.

3 On the influence of Spencer and
the conservative Social Darwinists
see Richard Hofstadter, Social Dar-
winism in American Thought (Phil-
adelphia), 1944, pp. 18-37; and Stow
Persons, ed., Evolutionary Thought
in America (New Haven, 1950),
particularly the essays by Robert
E. L. Faris (pp. 160-80) and Ed-
ward S. Corwin (pp. 182-99).

4 "Poor Man's Pudding and Rich
Man's Crumbs" in The Complete
Stories of Herman Melville, ed. by
Jay Leyda (New York, 1949), pp.
176-77. This story was originally
published in Harpers New Month-
ly Magazine, June, 1854.

5 Theodore Parker, Sermon on the
Perishing Classes in Boston (Boston,
1846), p. 10. Similar views are ex-
pressed in F. A. Walker, "The
Causes of Poverty," The Century
Illustrated Monthly Magazine, LV
(1897-98), 216; and Carroll D.
Wright, Outline of Practical So-
ciology (New York, 1899), p. 323.
For British opinion see London
Congregational Union, The Bitter
Cry of Outcast London, An Inquiry

into the Condition of the Abject
Poor (Boston, 1883), p. 5; and John
A. Hobson, Problems of Poverty
(7th edition, London, 1909), p. 12.
Hobson's book was first published
in 1891.

6 Ira Steward, Poverty (Boston, 1873),
p. 3.

7 Brownson's views are set forth and
discussed in Arthur M. Schlesinger,
Jr., Orestes A. Br owns on, A Pil-
grim's Progress (Boston, 1939), p.
91 and note 46, pp. 91-92.

8R. C. Waterston, An Address on
Pauperism, Its Extent, Causes, and
the Best Means of Prevention (Bos-
ton, 1844), p. 10.

9 Joseph Kirkland, Zury: The Mean-
est Man in Spring County. A Novel
of Western Life (Boston and New
York, 1888), p. 1.

10 Rodney Welch, "Horace Greeley's
Cure for Poverty," The Forum,
VIII (1889-90), 586-93. Henry
Demarest Lloyd, "The Lords of In-
dustry," North American Review,
CXXXVIII (1884), 552. The "Myth
of the Garden" is examined in
Henry Nash Smith, Virgin Land.
The American West as Symbol and
Myth (Cambridge, 1950), p. 189
et seq.

11 John R. Commons, Social Reform
and the Church (New York, 1894),
p. 34.

12 Josiah Strong, The New Era or The
Coming Kingdom (New York,
1893), p. 156.

13 William Dean Howells, Impressions
and Experiences (New York, 1896),
p. 149.

14 E. B. Andrews, "The Social Plaint,"
The New World, I (1892), 206
and 212-13.

15 Josephine Shaw Lowell, "Methods
of Relief for the Unemployed,"
The Forum, XVI (1893-94), 659.

16 The instructive series of legal deci-
sions known as the Seed and Feed
Cases, which reveals a gradually

Notes

275

broadening concept of poverty as it
affected farmers, is printed in Edith
Abbott, Public Assistance (Chicago,
1940), pp. 73-96. On this point see
also Grover Cleveland's veto of a
bill authorizing distribution of seeds
to drought sufferers in Texas, Feb-
ruary 16, 1887, in James D. Rich-
ardson, comp., A Compilation of
the Messages and Papers of the
Presidents (11 vols. [New York],
1910), VII, 5142-43.

17 There are interesting comments on
agrarian attitudes toward political
action in the late nineteenth century
in Richard Hofstadter, The Age
of Reform (New York, 1955), p. 46
et seq.

18 George T. Dowling, The Wreck-
ers: A Social Study (Philadelphia,
1886), p. 224; and Oscar Craig,
"The Prevention of Pauperism,"
Scribner's Magazine, XIV (1893),
121.

19 Richardson, comp., A Compilation
of the Messages and Papers of the
Presidents, VII, 5359 and 5361.

20 Richard T. Ely, Problems of To-
day. A Discussion of Protective
Tariffs, Taxation and Monopolies
(3rd edition, New York, 1890), p.
65; and Washington Gladden, "The
Problems of Poverty," The Cen-
tury, XLV (1892-93), 256.

21 Edward Eggleston, The Hoosier
Schoolmaster (New York, 1871),
p. 29.

22 The main ideas of George's Prog-
ress and Poverty are analyzed
in Charles Albro Barker, Henry
George (New York, 1955), pp.
265-304.

23 Thomas G. Shearman defended
George's position in The Forum,
VIII (1889-90), 40-52 and 262-73.
For the contrary view of Edward
Atkinson see Harold Francis Wil-
liamson, Edward Atkinson, The
Biography of an American Liberal,
1821-1905 (Boston, 1934), pp. 260-

66. See also Strong, New Era, pp.
151-52; and Andrews, "The Social
Plaint," p. 209.

24 Felix Adler, An Ethical Philosophy
of Life Presented in Its Main Out-
lines (New York, 1929), p. 44.

25 Lloyd, "The Lords of Industry,"
p. 552. For a discussion of Theo-
dore Parker's attitude toward com-
petition and other economic issues
see Daniel Aaron, Men of Good
Hope. A Story of American Pro-
gressives (New York, 1951), pp.
38-50.

26 Helen Stuart Campbell, Prisoners
of Poverty (Boston, 1887), pp.
254-55. This book is a compilation
of Mrs. Campbell's articles which
first appeared in the New York
Daily Tribune on October 24, 1886,
and at weekly intervals thereafter.

27 Andrews, "The Social Plaint," 215.

28 George D. Herron, The New Re-
demption (New York, 1893), p. 29.

29 Strong, The New Era, p. 347.

30 Washington Gladden, Social Salva-
tion (Boston and New York, 1902),
p. 5.

31 Ibid., p. 7.

32 The development of the social gos-
pel is treated in Aaron Ignatius
Abell, The Urban Impact on Amer-
ican Protestantism, 1865-1900 (Cam-
bridge, 1943); Charles Howard
Hopkins, The Rise of the Social
Gospel in American Protestantism,
1865-1915 (New Haven, 1940);
and Henry F. May, Protestant
Churches and Industrial America
(New York, 1949).

33 On this point see Henry J. Browne,
The Catholic Church and the
Knights of Labor (Washington,
D.C., 1949).

34 Rerum novarum is printed in Don-
ald O. Wagner, Social Reformers
(New York, 1947), pp. 617-37. For
comment on the encyclical see
Jacques Maritain, Ransoming the
Time (New York, 1941), p. 208;

Notes

276

Arthur Mann, Yankee Reformers
in the Urban Age (Cambridge,
1954), pp. 47-48; and Harvey
Wish, Society and Thought in
Modern America (New York,
1952), p. 171.

35 Robert A. Woods, "The Social
Awakening in London," Scribner's
Magazine, XI (1892), 407.

36 On the refusal of the Salvation
Army to discriminate between the
worthy and the unworthy, see St.
John Ervine, God's Soldier: Gen-
eral William Booth (2 vols., New
York, 1935), II, 709; and Walter

Besant, The Autobiography of Sir
Walter Besant (New York, 1902),
pp. 256-60.

37 Strong, The New Era, pp. 351-52.

38 Charles Richmond Henderson, The
Social Spirit in America (Chicago,
1905), p. 319. This book was first
published in 1897.

39 Richard T. Ely, "Pauperism in the
United States," North American
Review, CLII (1891), p. 395.

40 William Booth, In Darkest England
and the Way Out (London, 1890),
p. 48.

CHAPTER 3

The Charitable Impulse

1 Andrew Carnegie, "Wealth," North
American Review, CXLVIII (1889),
653-64. For an earlier statement of
the idea of stewardship see A. L.
Stone, The Relations of Poverty to
Human Discipline (Boston, 1851),
p. 13: "God has not deserted the
needy nor left them friendless. He
has committed them to our keep-
ing, making us his agents and fac-
tors, to see that they perish not. . . ."

2 Quoted in Samuel Rezneck, "The
Depression of 1819-1822, A Social
History," The American Historical
Review, XXXIX (1933-34), 40.

3 William Ellery Channing, The Min-
istry for the Poor (Boston, 1835),
p. 15.

4Tuckerman's views are outlined in
Joseph Tuckerman, On the Eleva-
tion of the Poor, ed. by Edward
Everett Hale (Boston, 1874); and in
his introduction to Joseph Marie de
Gerando, The Visitor of the Poor
. . . (Boston, 1832). For a discussion
of his work see Daniel T. McCol-

gan, Joseph Tuckerman; Pioneer in
American Social Work (Washing-
ton, 1940); Francis G. Peabody,
"Unitarianism and Philanthropy,"
The Charities Review, V (1895-
96), 26-28; Jeffrey Richardson
Brackett, Supervision and Education
in Charity (New York, 1903), pp.
6-8; and Frank D. Watson, The
Charity Organization Movement in
the United States. A Study in
American Philanthropy (New York,
1922), pp. 70-76.

5 John H. Griscom, The Sanitary
Condition of the Laboring Popula-
tion of New York with Suggestions
for Its Improvement (New York,
1845), pp. 24 and 28.

6 Elizabeth Oakes Smith, The News-
boy (New York, 1854), p. 88. The
work of the city missionaries of
the New York Mission and Tract
Society is discussed in Matthew
Hale Smith, Sunshine and Shadow
in New York (Hartford, Conn.,
1869), pp. 290-99. There is a wealth

Notes

111

of information on the subject in
Charles I. Foster, "The Urban
Missionary Movement, 1814-1837,"
The Pennsylvania Magazine of His-
tory and Biography, LXXV (1951),
47-65.

7 Catholic philanthropies are dis-
cussed in John O'Grady, Catholic
Charities in the United States
(Washington, D.C., 1930).

8 On Hartley's early life and career
see Isaac Smithson Hartley, ed.,
Memorial of Robert Milham Hart-
ley (Utica, New York, 1882); and
William H. Allen, Efficient Democ-
racy (New York, 1907), pp. 142-49.
On the distillery milk problem see
Robert M. Hartley, An Historical,
Scientific and "Practical Essay on
Milk, as an Article of Human Sus-
tenance . . . (New York, 1842).

9 Lilian Brandt, Growth and Devel-
opment of AICP and COS (A Pre-
liminary and Exploratory Review)
(New York, 1942), pp. 3-47 passim.
For the work of similar organiza-
tions in Boston see R. C. Waters-
ton, An Address on Pauperism, Its
Extent, Causes and the Best Means
of Prevention (Boston, 1844), pp.
10-11; and Report of the Howard
Benevolent Society for 1850 in
Stone, Relations of Poverty to
Human Discipline, following p. 17.
The A.I.C.P. movement as a whole
is discussed in Watson, The Charity
Organization Movement in the
United States, pp. 76-93.

10 New York A.I.C.P., The Economist
(New York, 1847), p. 12.

"New York A.I.C.P., First Report
of a Committee on the Sanitary
Condition of the Laboring Classes
in the City of New York, with
Remedial Suggestions (New York,
1853).

Robert M. Hartley, Thirteenth
Annual Report of the New York
A.I.C.P., 1856, pp. 52-54.

13 The "incidental labors" of the
A.I.C.P. are described in Brandt,
Growth and Development of AICP
and COS, pp. 47-64, Allen, Effi-
cient Democracy, pp. 149-52; and
Community Service Society of New
York, Frontiers of Human Welfare,
The Story of a Hundred Years of
Service to the Community of New
York, 1848-1948 (New York, 1948),
pp. 13-30.

14 Robert Hartley, Seventh Annual
Report of the New York A.I.C.P.,
1850, p. 27.

15 New York A.I.C.P., The Mistake
(New York, 1850), p. 4. See also
quotations from Hartley in Robert
W. Bruere, "The Good Samaritan,
Incorporated," Harper's Monthly
Magazine, CXX (1910), 385.

16 Smith, The Newsboy, pp. 28-29 and
33.

17 Charles Loring Brace, The Danger-
ous Classes of New York and
Twenty Years'* Work Among Them
(New York, 1872), p. 97. On child
vagrancy in Boston see Theodore
Parker, Sermon on the Perishing
Classes in Boston (Boston, 1846),
pp. 5-8.

18 Brace, The Dangerous Classes, p.
225. This view was earlier expressed
by the founders of the Boston Chil-
dren's Mission, organized in 1849.
In the opinion of Francis G. Pea-
body, the Boston Mission was the
forerunner of subsequent child-
saving societies in the United States
— "Unitarianism and Philanthropy,"
pp. 28-29.

19 For the activities conducted by the
Children's Aid Society a generation
after its establishment see George
P. Rowell, comp., New York Chari-
ties Directory (New York, 1888),
pp. 64-65; and Jacob A. Riis, The
Children of the Poor (New York,
1892), pp. 187-210 and 248-56.

20 Emerson David Fite, Social and In-

Notes

278

dustrial Conditions in the North
During the Civil War (New York,
1910), pp. 299-301, contains mate-
rial on the Children's Aid Society
and similar organizations during the
war period.

21 Homer Folks, The Care of Desti-
tute, Neglected, and Delinquent
Children (New York, 1902), pp.
67-68. On this problem see also
Riis, Children of the Poor, pp.
251-55; Amos G. Warner, Ameri-
can Charities. A Study in Philan-
thropy and Economics (New York,
1894), pp. 229-31; and Frank G.
Bruno, -Trends in Social Work as
Reflected in the Proceedings of the
National Conference of Social
Work, 1814-1946 (New York, 1948),
pp. 57-60.

22 Folks, The Care of Destitute, Neg-
lected, and Destitute Children, p.

68; and Edith Abbott, Some Amer-
ican Pioneers in Social Welfare.
Select Documents with Editorial
Notes (Chicago, 1937), p. 131.

23 Charles Howard Hopkins, The His-
tory of the Y.M.C.A. in North
America (New York, 1951), pp.
189-90.

24 This point is emphasized in Smith,
Sunshine and Shadow in New
York, p. 677.

25 Hopkins, History of the YM.C.A.,
p. 193.

26 For a concise summary of Civil
War charities see Fite, Social and
Industrial Conditions in the North,
pp. 275-311.

27 Quoted, ibid., p. 293.

28 William Rhinelander Stewart, The
Philanthropic Work of Josephine
Shaw Lowell (New York, 1911), p.
36.

CHAPTER 4

The Rise of Social Work

llThe Town Poor" in The Best
Stories of Sarah Orne Jewett se-
lected by Willa Cather (2 vols.,
Boston and New York, 1925), II,
224-47.

2 S. H. Elliot, A Look at Home; or
Life in The Poor-House of New
England (New York, 1860), p. 35.

3 Homer Folks, The Care of Desti-
tute, Neglected, and Delinquent
Children (New York, 1902), pp.
3-4.

4 Ibid., pp. 8 and 39-42. T. S. Deni-
son, Louva the Pauper. A Drama
in Five Acts (Chicago, 1878), re-
lates the sad story of a well-to-do
girl, who, through a series of mis-
fortunes, is bound out to service
by the overseers of the poor.

5 Amos G. Warner, American Chari-
ties. A Study in Philanthropy and
Economics (New York, 1894), pp.
162-76. See also Daniel T. McCol-
gan, Joseph Tuckerman; Pioneer in
American Social Work (Washing-
ton, 1940), pp. 196-97.

6 Josephine Shaw Lowell, Public Re-
lief and Private Charity (New York,
1884), quoted in Edith Abbott,
Some American Pioneers in Social
Welfare. Select Documents with
Editorial Notes (Chicago, 1937), p.
160.

7 Ibid.

8 Ibid., pp. 160-61.

9 Edward Eggleston, The Hoosier
Schoolmaster (New York, 1871),
pp. 163-64 contain a memorable de-

Notes

279

scription of an undifferentiated
almshouse in frontier Indiana. See
also Elliott, A Look at Home, pp.
26-32.

10 On this point see James H. and
Mary Jane Rodabaugh, Nursing in
Ohio (Columbus, Ohio, 1951), pp.
20-23.

11 On the state boards of public char-
ity see Jeffrey Richardson Brackett,
Supervision and Education in Char-
ity (New York, 1903), pp. 18 et
seq.; and Frank J. Bruno, Trends
in Social Work as Reflected in the
Proceedings of the National Con-
ference of Social Work, 1814-1946
(New York, 1948), pp. 31-43.

12 Ohio. Board of State Charities,
Third Annual Report, 1869 (Co-
lumbus, 1870), p. 28.

13 Fred. H. Wines, secretary, Board
of Public Charities of the State of
Illinois, Second Biennial Report,
1812 (Springfield, 111., 1873), p. 190.

14 William P. Letchworth, "Pauper
and Destitute Children in State of
New York." State Board of Chari-
ties, Eighth Annual Report, 181$
(Albany, 1875), pp. 233-34.

15 Wines, Second Biennial Report,
1812, p. 189.

i6 William Bristol Shaw, "Louisa Lee
Schuyler," Dictionary of American
Biography, XVI, 474-75. For an
account of the work of the Visiting
Committee of Bellevue Hospital see
Elizabeth Christopher Hobson,
"Founding of the Bellevue Train-
ing School for Nurses" in Abby
Howland Woolsey, A Century of
Nursing (New York, 1950), p. 135
et seq.

17Eggleston, The Hoosier School-
master, Chapter XXIII, "A Charit-
able Institution," especially pp. 163
and 168-69. For an interesting con-
temporary evaluation of Eggleston's
work see Washington Gladden,
"Edward Eggleston," Scribner's

Monthly, VI (1873), 561-64. For a
strikingly similar diagnosis of the
poorhouse problem see Elliot, A
Look at Home.

18 Folks, The Care of Destitute, Neg-
lected, and Delinquent Children,
pp. 72-80; see also Warner, Ameri-
can Charities, pp. 139-61.

19 For a history of the C.O.S. Move-
ment see Charles D. Kellogg, "Char-
ity Organization in the United
States," Proceedings of the National
Conference of Charities and Cor-
rection, 1893, pp. 52-93; and Frank
Dekker Watson, The Charity Or-
ganization Movement in the United
States (New York, 1922).

20 Community Service Society of New
York, Frontiers in Human Welfare.
The Story of a Hundred Years of
Service to the Community of New
York, 1848-1948 (New York, 1948),
p. 35.

21 Ruth Scannell, "A History of the
Charity Organization Society of the
City of New York from 1892 to
1935" (mimeographed report in the
files of the Community Service So-
ciety of New York), p. 12.
Woodyard of the Charity Organi-
zation Society, Appeal for Funds,
January 30, 1901 (in files of Com-
munity Service Society of New
York).

Kellogg, "Charity Organization in
the United States," Appendix F,
following p. 93.

24 John Boyle O'Reilly, "In Bohemia"
(1886), quoted in Jane Addams, et
al., Philanthropy and Social Prog-
ress (New York, 1893), p. 135.

25 William T. Stead, If Christ Came
to Chicago (London, 1894), p. 127.

26 Alice Hegan Rice, Mrs. Wiggs of
the Cabbage Patch (New York,
1937), p. 18. First published in
1901.

"William Dean Howells, "Tribula-
tions of a Cheerful Giver" in Im-

Notes

280

pressions and Experiences (New
York, 1896), p. 184. See also How-
ells' remarks on mendicancy in A
Hazard of New Fortunes (2 vols.,
New York, 1890), II, 256.

28 Frederic C. Howe, Confessions of
A Reformer (New York, 1925), pp.
78-79; for a similar expression of
opinion see Brand Whitlock, The
Turn of the Balance (Indianapolis,
1907), p. 291.

29 There was a 250 per cent increase
in the number of paid workers em-
ployed by Charity Organization
Societies between 1882 and 1892,
but even in the latter year volun-
teers greatly outnumbered paid staff
members. Kellogg, "Charity Organ-
ization in the United States," Ap-
pendix F. The difficulty encoun-
tered in enlisting volunteers during
the nineties is discussed in Francis
Peabody, "How Should a City Care
for Its Poor," The Forum, XIV
(1892-93), 474-91; and Jacob A.
Riis, "Special Needs of the Poor
in New York," The Forum, XIV
(1892-93), 492-502.

30 On this point see Edward T. De-
vine, When Social Work Was
Young (New York, 1939), pp. 69-
70; and John R. Commons, Social
Reform and the Church (New
York, 1894), pp. 46-^7.

31 On the significance of the case
method see Warner, American
Charities, p. 22 et seq.; and Stuart
Alfred Queen, Social Work in the
Light of History (Philadelphia,
1922), p. 114.

32 John R. Commons, Myself (New
York, 1934), p. 43.

33 Lilian Brandt, Growth and Devel-
opment of AICP and COS (A
Preliminary and Exploratory Re-
view) (New York, 1942), pp. 143
and 221; and Devine, When Social
Work Was Young, pp. 34-35.

34 See Warner, American Charities,

Table IV, facing p. 34; and John
Koren, Economic Aspects of the
Liquor Problem (Boston and New
York, 1899), pp. 42-44.

35 See, for example, the bibliography
of Marcus T. Reynolds, The Hous-
ing of the Poor in American Cities
(n.p., 1893), pp. 127-32; and De-
vine, When Social Work Was
Young, p. 69.

36 The development of the concept
of social work in the charity or-
ganization movement may be stud-
ied in the letters and papers of
Mrs. Josephine Shaw Lowell in
William Rhinelander Stewart, The
Philanthropic Work of Josephine
Shaw Lowell (New York, 1911).
Mrs. Lowell's essay "Criminal Re-
form" in Frances A. Goodale, ed.,
Literature of Philanthropy (New
York, 1893), gives a concise state-
ment of her position. For a brief
discussion of the emergence of the
concept of social work see Devine,
When Social Work Was Young, p.
149 et seq.

37 Quoted in W. S. Rainsford, The
Story of a Varied Life (Garden
City, New York, 1922), p. 313.

38 Ibid.; see also Rainsford's article
"What Can We Do For the Poor?"
The Forum, XI (1891), 124-25; and
Alexander Irvine, From the Bottom
Up (New York, 1910), p. 156.

39 Aaron Ignatius Abell, The Urban
Impact on American Protestantism
(Cambridge, 1943), p. 4.

40 For early ventures in evangelical
work among the poor in Boston
see Daniel T. McColgan, Joseph
Tuckerman; Pioneer in American
Social Work. In New York both
the Five Points Mission and the
Five Points House of Industry were
founded in the 1850's, the Howard
Mission in 1861, and Jerry Mac-
Auley's Water Street Mission in
1872. For contemporary accounts

Notes

281

of the work of these early missions
see Solon Robinson, Hot Corn:
Life Scenes in New York Illustrated
(New York, 1854), pp. 50-52; The
World (New York), December 26,
1860, p. 6; Matthew Hale Smith,
Sunshine and Shadow in New York
(Hartford, 1869), pp. 204-6; and
T. L. Cuyler, "The Five Points
House of Industry," Harper's Week-
ly, XXIV (1880), 27.

41 Paul Leicester Ford, The Honor-
able Peter Sterling (New York,
1894), p. 134.

42 For social work conducted by vari-
ous missions see Abell, Urban Im-
pact on American Protestantism, p.
34 et seq.; and B. O. Flower, Civili-
zation's Inferno; or Studies in the
Social Cellar (Boston, 1893), pp.
50-51.

43 Herbert Asbury, The Gangs of
New York, An Informal History
of the Underworld (New York
and London, 1927), pp. 16-19.
There is a description of Pease in
Robinson, Hot Corn, p. 109. For
the program of the Five Points
House of Industry in the mid-
eighties see George P. Rowell,
comp., New York Charities Direc-
tory (New York, 1888), pp. 136-37.

44 For Irvine's description of the en-
vironment in which his missionary
work was carried on see From the
Bottom Up, pp. 94-96. "An Experi-
ment in Misery" is reprinted in
Stephen Crane, Twenty Stories
(New York, 1940).

45 Irvine, From the Bottom Up, pp.
92 and 103.

48 On the origins of the institutional
church movement see Abell, Urban
Impact on American Protestantism,
pp. 139-42; and William Warren
Sweet, The Story of Religion in
America (New York, 1939), pp.
524-25.

47 Josiah Strong, "Institutional Church"

in W. D. P. Bliss, Encyclopedia of
Social Reforms (New York and
London, 1898), p. 629.

48 Sweet, Story of Religion in Amer-
ica, p. 524.

49 On Conwell, see ibid., p. 525; Abell,
Urban Impact on American Protes-
tantism, pp. 157-58; and Ralph
Henry Gabriel, The Course of
American Democratic Thought
(New York, 1940), p. 149.

50Rainsford, The Story of a Varied
Life, p. 314.

51 Charles Howard Hopkins, The Rise
of the Social Gospel in American
Protestantism, 1865-191$ (New Ha-
ven, 1940), pp. 142 and 275-77.

52 London Congregational Union, The
Bitter Cry of Outcast London. An
Inquiry into the Condition of the
Abject Poor (Boston, 1883), p. 1.

53 Gregory Weinstein, The Ardent
Eighties and After. Reminiscences
of a Busy Life (New York, 1947),
pp. 89-92.

54 Alice Hamilton, Exploring the Dan-
gerous Trades (Boston, 1943), p.
27.

55 Charles Loring Brace, The Dan-
gerous Classes of New York and
Twenty Years' Work Among Them
(New York, 1872), p. 136.

56 Queen, Social Work in the Light
of History, p. 134.

57 Graham Taylor, Pioneering on So-
cial Frontiers (Chicago, 1930), pp.
8-9.

58 O. F. Lewis, "The Conquest of
Poverty. Some Things That Or-
ganized Charity Is Trying to Do,"
Metropolitan Magazine, XXXIII
(1909-10), 198.

59 Taylor, Pioneering on Social Fron-
tiers, p. 292.

J. G. Phelps Stokes, The Neighbor-
hood Guild (unpublished memoir
in Stokes papers), quoting Helen
Moore, librarian at the Neighbor-
hood Guild.

Notes

282

91 Ibid.

62 Helen Moore, "Tenement Neigh-
borhood Idea — University Settle-
ment," in Goodale, ed., The Litera-
ture of Philanthropy, pp. 35-36.

63 Jean Fine Spahr and Fannie W.
McLean, "Tenement Neighborhood
Idea" in Goodale, ed., The Litera-
ture of Philanthropy, p. 25.

64 Jane Addams, "Social Settlements,"
Proceedings of the National Con-
ference of Charities and Correction,
1897, p. 345.

65 Hamilton, Exploring the Dangerous
Trades, pp. 65-66. The various ac-
tivities sponsored by Hull House
are discussed in Bruno, Trends in
Social Work, pp. 115-16.

66 Brander Matthews, "In Search of
Local Color" in Vignettes of Man-
hattan (New York, 1894), p. 69.

67 Mary Kingsbury Simkhovitch,
Neighborhood. My Story of Green-

wich House (New York, 1938),
p. 85.

68 Jacob A. Riis, The Making of an
American (New York, 1903), p.
316. The role of settlements in ad-
vancing social reform is discussed
in Bruno, Trends in Social Work,
pp. 117-18.

69 Malcolm Cowley, Exile's Return.
A Literary Odyssey of the 1920's
(New York, 1951), p. 34.

70 Howe, Confessions of a Reformer,
pp. 75-76.

71 Jack London, The People of the
Abyss (New York, 1903), p. 307.
This attack was directed specifically
at the settlements and settlement
workers in the East End of London.

72 Ibid., p. 306.

73 Smith, Sunshine and Shadow in New
York, pp. 209-10.

74 Addams, "Social Settlements," p.
344.

75 Simkhovitch, Neighborhood, p. 73.

CHAPTER 5

The Condition of the Poor?
Late Nineteenth-Century Social Investigations

1 See, for example, Ned Buntline
[E. Z. C. Judson], The Mysteries and
Miseries of New York (New York,
1848); Matthew Hale Smith, Sun-
shine and Shadow in New York
(Hartford, 1869); J. W. Buel, Met-
ropolitan Life Unveiled; or The
Mysteries and Miseries of America's
Great Cities (St. Louis, 1882); and
Helen Campbell, Thomas W. Knox,
and Thomas Byrnes, Darkness and
Daylight: or Lights and Shadows
of New York Life . . . (Hartford,
1891).

2 Buel, Metropolitan Life Unveiled,
pp. 113 and 115.

8 William A. Rogers, "Tenement

Life in New York— Sketches in
'Bottle Alley,'" Harper's Weekly,
XXIII (1879), 224.

4 "Tenement Life in New York,"
Harper's Weekly, XXIII (1879),
267.

5 Jacob A. Riis, The Children of the
Poor (New York, 1892), pp. 261-62.

6 O. B. Frothingham, "Is Poverty
Increasing?" The Arena, I (1889-
90), 115.

7 Helen Gardener, "Thrown in with
the City's Dead," The Arena, III
(1890-91), 61-70.

8 Robert A. Woods, et al., "The Poor
in Great Cities," Scribner's Maga-
zine, XI (1892), 400.

Notes

2S3

9 Washington Gladden, "The Prob-
lem of Poverty," The Century,
XLV (1892-93), 246. Cf. Herbert
B. Adams, "Notes on the Literature
of Charities," Johns Hopkins Uni-
versity Studies in Historical and
Political Science, V (1887), 283-
324.

10 Elisha Harris, Foreword to Robert
L. Dugdale, The Jukes. A Study in
Crime, Pauperism, Disease and Her-
edity (4th edition, New York and
London, 1910), p. 4.
The impact of Booth's work on
American research is discussed by
Gladden, "The Problem of Pov-
erty"; Robert A. Woods, "The So-
cial Awakening in London," Scrib-
nefs Magazine, XI (1892), 423; and
Graham Taylor, "The Standard for
a City's Survey," Charities and the
Commons, XXI (1908-9), 508.
Charles B. Spahr, An Essay on the
Present Distribution of Wealth in
the United States (New York,
1896), p. 95.
Ibid., p. v.

Richard T. Ely, "Pauperism in the
United States," North American
Review, CLII (1891), 397.

15 On this point see William Franklin
Willoughby, "State Activities in
Relation to Labor in the United
States," Johns Hopkins University
Studies in Historical and Political
Science, XIX (1901), 210-12; Wil-
liam Franklin Willoughby, "Child
Labor," Publications of the Ameri-
can Economic Association, V
(1890), 147-48; and G. W. W.
Hanger, "Labor Bureaus" in The
New Encyclopedia of Social Re-
form, ed. by W. D. P. Bliss (New
York and London, 1910), pp. 675-
77.

16 Hanger, "Labor Bureaus," p. 676,
gives data on the staffing and bud-
gets of both state and federal bu-
reaus of labor statistics.

17 United States. Commissioner of

Labor, Seventh Special Report. . . .
The Slums of Baltimore, Chicago,
New York and Philadelphia (Wash-
ington, 1894), pp. 11-12.

18 United States. Commissioner of
Labor, Eleventh Annual Report,
1895-96. Work and Wages of Men,
Women and Children (Washing-
ton, 1897), p. 11.

19 Spahr, An Essay on the Present
Distribution of Wealth, p. 52, foot-
note 1, and pp. 107-9.

20 For an attack on Wright's sum-
mary in his Fourth Annual Report
see Florence Kelley (Wischnewet-
sky), "A Decade of Retrogression,"
The Arena, IV (1891), 368-69.

21 Leah Hannah Feder, Unemploy-
ment Relief in Periods of Depres-
sion (New York, 1936), pp. 38-39.
Ibid., pp. 83-87.

23 Davis R. Dewey, "Irregularity of
Employment," Publications of the
American Economic Association,
IX (1894), 532-33. Some of the
factors cited by Dewey were: in-
troduction of labor-saving machin-
ery, elimination of certain labor
processes to reduce costs, substitu-
tion of juvenile and female labor
for male, migration of industry,
and seasonal work.

24 Edward W. Bemis, "Mine Labor
in the Hocking Valley," Publica-
tions of the American Economic
Association, III (1888), 185-87.

25 Amos G. Warner, American Chari-
ties. A Study in Philanthropy and
Economics (New York, 1894), pp.
99-100. An exception to the gen-
eral rule was the New Jersey Bu-
reau of Labor Statistics which,
between 1889 and 1891, examined
the effect of labor in the pottery,
hat-making and glass-blowing indus-
tries on employees' health and
trade life.

26 Benjamin Harrison, First Annual
Message, December 3, 1889, in
James D. Richardson, comp., A

Notes

284

Compilation of the Messages and
Papers of the Presidents (11 vols.
[New York], 1910), VIII, 5486.

27 Ibid., and pp. 5561, 5642-43, and
5766. For the Railroad Safety Ap-
pliance Act of March 2, 1893, see
27 Statutes at Large 531-32.

28 Willoughby, "Accidents to Labor
as Regulated by Law in the United
States," Bulletin of the Department
of Labor, VI (1901), 1-28.

29 On Lorenzo S. Coffin see Norman
Paul, "The Coffin That Kept Rail-
roaders Alive," Tracks, XXXVI
(August, 1951), 2-5.

80 Willoughby, Workingmen's Insur-
ance (New York, 1898), p. 329.

31 Clare de Graffenried, "Child La-
bor," Publications of the American
Economics Association, V (1890),
p. 255.

32 Willoughby, Workingrnen's Insur-
ance, pp. 308-9.

33 de Graff enried, "Child Labor," p.
255; see also Helen Campbell,
Prisoners of Poverty (Boston, 1887),
pp. 32-33.

34 R. C. Waterston, An Essay on
Pauperism, Its Extent, Causes, and
the Best Means of Prevention (Bos-
ton, 1844), p. 19. For a discussion
of Joseph Tuckerman's Prize Essay
on the Wages Paid to Females
(1830), see Daniel T. McColgan,
Joseph Tuckerman (Washington,
1940), pp. 165-66.

35 Louisa May Alcott, Work (Boston,
1873), p. 149.

36 Campbell, Women Wage-Earners:
Their Past, Their Present and Their
Future (Boston, 1893), p. 213. For
a more sensational treatment of the
same theme see Louis A. Banks,
White Slaves or the Oppression of
the Worthy Poor (Boston, 1892).

37 There is a convenient tabular sum-
mary of child-labor laws as of 1896
in F. J. Stimson, Handbook to the
Labor Law of the United States
(New York, 1896), pp. 74-75.

Willoughby, "Child Labor," Publi-
cations of the American Economic
Association, V (1890), 154. See also
Bemis, "Mine Labor in the Hock-
ing Valley," pp. 189-92.

39 Willoughby, "Child Labor," pp.
150-51.

40 Selection from "Honest Harry; or
The Country Boy Adrift in the
City" (1885), in Albert Johannsen,
The House of Beadle and Adams
... (2 vols., Norman, Okla., 1950),
pp. 209-12.

41 Elizabeth Oakes Smith, The News-
boy (New York, 1854), pp. 28-29.

42 Bemis, "Mine Labor in the Hocking
Valley," p. 189.

43 Charles Loring Brace, The Danger-
ous Classes of New York and
Twenty Years' Work Among Them
(New York, 1872), p. 353 et. seq.

44 Clara Sidney Potter, "Factory Con-
ditions in New York," The Christian
Union, XXXIX (1889), 566.

45 de Graffenried, "Child Labor," p.
252.

46 Willoughby, "Child Labor," pp.
182-83.

47 Ibid., p. 191; and de Graffenried,
"Child Labor," pp. 270-71.

48 "Private Life of the Gamin," Daily
Graphic (New York), March 11,
1873, p. 3.

49 Florence Kelley and Alzina P. Ste-
vens, "Wage-Earning Children" in
Hull-House Maps and Papers (New
York, 1895), pp. 50 and 58. On
Mrs. Kelley see Josephine Gold-
mark, Impatient Crusader, Florence
Kelley *s Life Story (Urbana, 111.,
1953); on Alzina P. Stevens, see
Alice Hamilton, Exploring the Dan-
gerous Trades (Boston, 1943), p.
62.

50 Kelley, "The Working Child," Pro-
ceedings of the National Conference
of Charities and Correction, 1896,
pp. 161-65.

Campbell, "White Child Slavery,"
The Arena, I (1889-90), 591.

Notes

52 Kelley, "The Working Child," pp.
161-63.

53 This view is well expressed in B. O.
Flower, Civilization's Inferno; or
Studies in the Social Cellar (Boston,
1893), p. 26.

54 William Ellery Channing, "On the
Elevation of the Laboring Classes,"
in The Works of William E. Chan-
ning, D.D. (Boston, 1889), p. 58.

55McColgan, Joseph Tuckerman, p.
176; and John Koren, Economic As-
pects of the Liquor Problem (Bos-
ton and New York, 1899), pp. 11-
12.

56 Flower, Civilization's Inferno, p.
36; Carroll D. Wright, Outline of
Practical Sociology (New York,
1899), p. 323; Henderson, The So-
cial Spirit, p. 28; Josiah Strong,
The New Era or the Coming King-
dom (New York, 1893), p. 156; and
John R. Commons, Social Reform
and the Church (New York and
Boston, 1894), p. 42.

57 Raymond Calkins, Substitutes for
the Saloon (Boston and New York,
1901), p. v. The President of the
Committee of Fifty was Seth Low
and among its members were
Washington Gladden, Carroll D.
Wright, Richard Watson Gilder,
Daniel Coit Gilman, Charles W.
Eliot, Felix Adler, John Graham
Brooks, and Richard T. Ely.

58 Koren, Economic Aspects of the
Liquor Problem, p. 9. This volume
should not be confused with a sim-
ilarly titled report by Carroll D.
Wright which sought to examine
the place of the liquor industry in
the American economy.

59 Calkins, Substitutes for the Saloon,
p. viii. Cf. Paul Leicester Ford,
The Honorable Peter Stirling (New
York, 1894), p. 133; and Strong,
The New Era, p. 244.

60 See also the essay on saloons in

285

Chicago's Nineteenth Ward and a
summary view of New York drink-
ing places in Koren, Economic As-
pects of the Liquor Problem, pp.
211-30.

61 Quoted in Bliss, ed. New Encyclo-
pedia of Social Reform, p. 939.

62 E. R. L. Gould, The Housing of
Working People (Washington,
1895), p. 436.

63 Julian Ralph, "A Day of the Pino-
chle Club" in People We Pass,
Stories of Life Among the Masses
in New York City (New York,
1896), p. 78.

64 Quoted in Joseph Lee, Constructive
and Preventive Philanthropy (New
York, 1906), p. 56.

65 For a brief account of the establish-
ment of municipal boards of health
in Eastern cities see Allan Nevins,
The Emergence of Modern Amer-
ica, 1865-1818 (New York, 1927),
pp. 320-23.

66 "Tenement Life in New York,"
Harper's Weekly, XXIII (1879),
246.

67 Lillian W. Betts, "Tenement House
Life," The Christian Union, XL VI
(1892), 69.

68 Channing, "On the Elevation of the
Laboring Classes," p. 58.

69Riis, "Special Needs of the Poor
in New York," The Forum, XIV
(1892-93), 494.

70 Spahr, An Essay on the Present Dis-
tribution of Wealth, pp. 68-69 and
128-29.

71 Warner, American Charities, p. 26.

72 James Mavor, "The Relation of
Economic Study to Public and Pri-
vate Charity," Annals of the Ameri-
can Academy of Political and Social
Science, IV (1893-94), pp. 39-40.

73 Ibid., p. 39.

74 E. B. Andrews, "The Social Plaint,"
The New World, I (1892), 216.

Notes

286

CHAPTER 6

The Discovery of Poverty in Literature

1The social and economic attitudes
of the New England writers are
discussed in William Charvat,
"American Romanticism and the
Depression of 1837," Science and
Society, II (1937), 67-82.

2 Ralph Waldo Emerson, Journals
(10 vols., Boston, 1909-14), II, 463.

3 Ibid., IV, 244-45.

4 A. I. Cummings, The Factory Girl:
or Gardez La Coeur [sic] (Lowell,
1847), pp. 48 and 151-52.

5 The quotations are from Dickens'
preface to Oliver Twist.

6 William Dean Howells, My Liter-
ary Passions (New York, 1895), pp.
99-100.

7 For valuable comment on Dickens'
attitude toward the poor see Edgar
Johnson, Charles Dickens, His Trag-
edy and Triumph (2 vols., New
York, 1952), II, 793-94.

8 Quoted in John A. Kouwenhoven,
Made in America. The Arts in
Modern Civilization (New York,
1948), p. 153. A twelve- volume
edition of Lippard's works was
published by T. B. Peterson and
Brothers of Philadelphia in 1876.

9 This story is told in William T.
Coggeshall, "The Late George Lip-
pard," Genius of the West (Cin-
cinnati), II (1854), 85.

10 Henry Nash Smith, Virgin Land.
The American West as Symbol and
Myth (Cambridge, 1950), p. 103.

11 George Clinton Densmore Odell,
Annals of the New York Stage (15
vols., New York, 1927-49), III,
684-85.

12 Ibid., V, 372-73.

13 Dion Boucicault, Poor of New York
(New York, 1857), p. 13. This play
was acted under the title Streets of
New York.

A good example is Maria S. Cum-
mins' extremely popular novel,
The Lamplighter (Boston, 1854).

15 Elizabeth Oakes Smith, The News-
boy (New York, 1854), p. 26.

16 Herman Melville, Redburn: His
First Voyage: Being the Sailor-Boy
Confessions and Reminiscences of
the Son-of-a-Gentleman, in the
Merchant Service (New York,
1850), p. 229.

17 "A Parable" in The Complete
Works of James Russell Lowell
(Cambridge edition, Boston and
New York, 1917), p. 95.

18Estelle W. Stead, My Father, Per-
sonal and Spiritual Reminiscences
(New York, 1913), p. 211; and Jack
London, The People of the Abyss
(New York, 1903), p. v.

19 There is an appreciative essay on
Lowell as a "Patrician Democrat"
in Arthur Hobson Quinn, ed., The
Literature of the American People
(New York, 1951), pp. 374-83.

20 Rebecca Harding Davis, "A Story
of To-Day," The Atlantic Monthly,
VIII (1861), 472.

21 Davis, "Life in the Iron Mills," The
Atlantic Monthly, VII (1861), 430.

22 Davis, "A Story of To-Day," pp.
473 and 475.

23 Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, "The Tenth
of January," The Atlantic Monthly,
XXI (1868), 345-46.

24 The Silent Partner is discussed in
Vernon Louis Parrington, Main
Currents in American Thought (3
vols., New York, 1927-30), III, 61-
62; see also Edward E. Cassady,
"Muckraking in the Gilded Age,"
American Literature, XIII (1941),
137.

25 "The Symphony" in The Centen-
nial Edition of the Works of Sidney

Notes

ffl

Lanier (10 vols., Baltimore, 1945),
1,47.

26 George T. Dowling, The Wreck-
ers: A Social Study (Philadelphia,
1886), pp. 66, 394-95, and 400.

27Augustin Daly, Edward Harrigan,
et al., "American Playwrights on
the American Drama," Harper's
Weekly, XXXIII (1889), 97.

28 Ibid., p. 98.

29 Harrigan, Hart and Dave Braham's
Immortal Songs (n.p., n.d.), pages
not numbered. This volume is in
the Music Room of the New York
Public Library.

30 Harrigan and Braham's Songs
(Henry J. Wehman, publisher, New
York and Chicago, n.d. [1893?]),
pages not numbered.

31 Ibid.

32 Daly, Harrigan, et al., "American
Playwrights on the American
Drama," p. 97.

33 Brander Matthews, These Many
Years, Recollections of a New
Yorker (New York, 1917), p. 361.

34 Howells' comments on Harrigan are
quoted in Montrose J. Moses and
John Mason Brown, The American
Theater as Seen by Its Critics,
1152-1934 (New York, 1934), pp.
132-35. For Garland's view see
Crumbling Idols (Chicago, 1894),
p. 72. A recent study is E. J. Kahn,
Merry Partners; The Age and Stage
of Harrigan and Hart (New York,
1955).

35 "Jersey and Mulberry" (1893) in
The Stories of H. C. Bunner, First
Series (New York, 1916), pp. 324-
41.

36 "The Bowery and Bohemia" (1894),
ibid., pp. 373-74.

37 Garland, Crumbling Idols, p. 72.

38 Brander Matthews, "Before the
Break of Day" in Vignettes of
Manhattan (New York, 1894), p.
85.

39 Matthews, "In Search of Local
Color," ibid., p. 69.

40 James L. Ford, Forty-Odd Years in
the Literary Shop (New York,
1921), p. 118.

41 Ford, "Low Life in Modern Fic-
tion," Truth, XII (November 19,
1892), 12.

42 Ford, The Literary Shop and Other
Tales (New York, 1894), p. 142.

43 Julian Ralph, "Love in the Big Bar-
racks" in People We Pass. Stories
of Life Among the Masses of New
York City (New York, 1896), pp.
53-74.

44 Ralph, "A Day of the Pinochle
Club," ibid., pp. 88-89.

45 "The Love Letters of Smith" (1890)
in The Stories of H. C. Bunner,
Short Sixes and the Suburban Sage
(New York, 1919), p. 69.
Richard Harding Davis, "The Hun-
gry Man Was Fed," in Van Bibber
and Others (New York, 1892), pp.
47-52.

Davis, "Gallegher" in Gallegher
and Other Stories (New York,
1891), p. 2.

48 William Dean Howells, A Hazard
of New Fortunes (2 vols., New
York, 1890), II, p. 256.

49 Howells, A Traveller from Altruria
(New York, 1894), p. 260.

50 Howells, "Society," Harper's Maga-
zine, XC (1895), 630.

51 Garland, Main-Travelled Roads
(Boston, 1891), pp. 136 and 86.

52 Howells, "New York Streets" in
Impressions and Experiences (New
York, 1896), pp. 252-53.

53 Garland, "Up the Coule" in Main-
Travelled Roads, pp. 146 and 88.

54 Charles Dudley Warner, The Gold-
en House (New York, 1894), pp.
40-42.

65 Edward W. Townsend, A Daugh-
ter of the Tenements (New York,
1895), p. 61.

56 Quoted in "Stephen Crane," The
Bookman, I (1895), p. 229.

57 J. Lincoln Steffens, "Extermination,
Evolution in Operation on the East

Notes

283

Side," Commercial Advertiser (New
York), July 24, 1897. Riis's photo-
graph of "Bandits' Roost" (1887-
88) is reproduced in Marshall B.
Davidson, Life in America (2 vols.,
Boston, 1951), II, 180.
58Markham's explanation is quoted
in Mark Sullivan, Our Times; The

United States, 1900-192$ (6 vols.,
New York, 1926-35), II, 236.

59 See ibid., pp. 236-49, for an account
of the popular reception of "The
Man with the Hoe."

60 Garland, "The Cry of the Age,"
The Outlook, LXII (1899), 37.

CHAPTER 7

The Poverty Theme in Art and Illustration

1 Stephen Crane, The Third Violet
(New York, 1897), pp. 185-86.

2 Henry B. Fuller, "Art in America,"
The Bookman, X (1899), 220.

3 The quoted passage is from Lloyd
Goodrich, Winslow Homer (New
York, 1944), p. 23.

4 Guy Pene Du Bois, Artists Say the
Silliest Things (New York, 1940),
pp. 163-64.

5 John I. H. Baur, Revolution and
Tradition in Modern American Art
(Cambridge, 1951), p. 11.

6 Frank Norris, McTeague, A Story
of San Francisco (New York, 1903),
p. 198.

7 Ibid., p. 157. Cf. "Making a Train"
by Seymour Joseph Guy repro-
duced in Samuel Isham, The His-
tory of American Painting (New
York, 1927), p. 344.

8 Reproduced in Isham, History of
American Painting, p. 347. For in-
teresting comments on Brown see
Virgil Barker, American Painting,
History and Interpretation (New
York, 1950), pp. 565-66.

9 Harper's Weekly, III (1859), 824-
25.

10 Quoted in Goodrich, Winslow
Homer, p. 54.

11 Ibid., pp. 51 and 54.

12 Goodrich, Thomas Eakins, His Life
and Work (New York, 1933), pp.
51-52.

13 W. Mackay LafTan, "The Material
of American Landscape," The
American Art Review, I (1880), 32.

14Townsend, A Daughter of the
Tenements, pp. 60-61.

15 For reproductions of the paintings
referred to in this paragraph see:
Baur, Revolution and Tradition in
Modern American Art, following
p. 20 (Tiffany, "Old New York");
Harper's Weekly, XXVI (1882),
105 (Smith, "Under the Bridge");
Metropolitan Museum of Art, Life
in America (New York, 1939), p.
204 (Maurer, "Forty- third Street
West of Ninth Avenue").

16 For reproductions of the works
mentioned see Baur, Revolution and
Tradition in Modern American Art,
facing p. 20 (Weir, "The Gun
Foundry"); Isham, The History of
American Painting, p. 351 (Weir,
"Forging the Shaft"); Davidson,
Life in America, I, 552 (Brown,
"Longshoreman's Noon"), and II,
406 (Ulrich, "The Land of Prom-
ise").

17 Reproduced in Davidson, Life in
America, I, 553.

18Larned is quoted in Baur, Revolu-
tion and Tradition in Modern
American Art, p. 14.

19 Harper's Weekly, XVII (1875),
73; XX (1876), 292; and XXVIII
(1884), 461.

Notes

289

™lbid., XXVIII (1884), 1. For an
appreciation of Frost's work by H.
C. Bunner see Harper's Magazine,
LXXXV (1892), 699-706.

21 Daily Graphic (New York), March
11, 1873, pp. 3-4.

22 Ibid., April 2, 1873, p. 5.

23 Ibid., March 14, 1880; reproduced in
Robert Taft, Photography and the
American Scene, A Social History,
1839-1889 (New York, 1938), p.
432.

24 John T. McCutcheon, Drawn from
Memory (Indianapolis, 1950), pp.
78-79. See also George Ade, Stories
of the Streets and of the Town
from the Chicago Record, 1893-
1900 (Chicago, 1941).

25 Harper's Weekly, XXIX (1885),
491 and 496.

™Ibid., XXIII (1879), 245.

27 Ibid., XXXI (1887), 529. For a sim-
ilar approach see Daily Graphic,
June 19, 1873, p. 5.

28 W. A. Rogers, A World Worth
While (New York, 1922), pp. 148-
51; for an example of his work see
Harper's Weekly, XXIII (1879),
224.

29 Forty-First Annual Report of the
New York A.I.C.P., 1884, p. 36.

30 Truth, XIV (March 9, 1895), rear
cover. On the Trinity tenements
see below, Chapter 12.

31 Truth, XI (March 4, 1893), pp.
8-9. Gibson's "An Evening with the
Gentlemen's Sons' Chowder Club"
is reproduced in William Murrell,
A History of American Graphic
Humor (2 vols., New York, 1935-
38), II, 106.

32 Charles Dickens, Bleak House
(Household Edition, New York,
n.d.), pp. 116 and 265.

33 Harper's Weekly, XX (1876), 121;
and XXIII (1879), 801.

34 Michael Angelo Woolf, Sketches of
Lowly Life in a Great City, ed. by
Joseph Henius (New York, 1899),
contains a collection of Woolf's
drawings and a biographical sketch
of the artist. For an example of one
of Woolf's early drawings, an illus-
tration of a Christmas dinner for
newsboys and girls, see Harper's
Weekly, XX (1876), 53.

35 For examples of early work by
Luks and Outcault see Truth, XII
(December 3, 1892), rear cover;
and XII (June 17, 1893), 6.

36 Harper's Weekly, XXXV (1891),
616-17.

37 See, for example, Frank Leslie's Il-
lustrated Newspaper, LXVI (1888),
1; Harper's Weekly, XXIX (1885),
801; XXXI (1887), 549 and 597.

38 Harper's Weekly, III (1859), 736;
Daily Graphic, June 24, 1873, p. 4
and June 28, 1873, p. 6.

39 Reproduced in Murrell, A History
of American Graphic Humor, II,
82. See also Walt McDougall, This
Is the Life (New York, 1926), pp.
96-102.

40 Truth, XIV (March 30, 1895), back
cover.

41 Krausz's pictures are in the Library
of Congress Collection of photo-
graphs.

42 Stieglitz's work during the nineties,
with several reproductions of pho-
tographs taken during this period,
is discussed in Theodore Dreiser,
"The Camera Club of New York,"
Ainslee's Magazine, IV (1899), 324-
35.

43 Truth, XII (December 3, 1892),
8-9.

Notes

290

CHAPTER 8

The New View of Poverty

1 Robert Hunter, Poverty (New
York, 1904), pp. 3 and 5-6.

2 John Lewis Gillin, Poverty and
Dependency ', Their Relief and Pre-
vention (New York, 1921), p. 23.

3 Jacob H. Hollander, The Abolition
of Poverty (Boston, 1914), p. 2. On
Hollander see Eric F. Goldman,
Rendezvous with Destiny (New
York, 1952), p. 285, footnote 4.

4 Hunter, Poverty, p. 5; Hollander,
Abolition of Poverty, p. 6.

5 Hollander, Abolition of Poverty,
p. 6.

6 New York A.I.C.P., Shall Widows
Be Pensioned? (New York, 1914),
p. 3.

7 Andrew Carnegie, "The Advantages
of Poverty," Nineteenth Century
Magazine, XXIX (1891), 367-85.

8 Hollander, Abolition of Poverty,
p. 5; and New York A.I.C.P., Shall
Widows Be Pensioned? p. 3.

9 Lilian Brandt, "The Causes of Pov-
erty," The Political Science Quar-
terly, XXIII (1908), 637.

10 George Gunton, "Poverty as a
Character Builder," Gunton's Mag-
azine, XXIV (1903), 208.

11 "The Struggle Against Social Des-
potism," The Outlook, LXXXII
(1906), 805.

12 Lester F. Ward, Applied Sociology.
A Treatise on the Conscious Im-
provement of Society by Society
(Boston, 1906), p. 228.

13 Edward T. Devine, Misery and
Its Causes (New York, 1909), p.
265.

14 Walter Rauschenbusch, Christianity
and the Social Crisis (New York,
1907), pp. 306-7.

15 Ruth S. True, The Neglected Girl
(New York, 1914), pp. 21-22.

16 Russell Sage Foundation, Boyhood

and Lawlessness (New York, 1914),
p. 61.

17 This subject is to be treated at
greater length in Chapter 10.

18 Owen Kildare, The Wisdom of the
Simple. A Tale of Lower New
York (New York, 1905), p. 250.

19 Ibid., p. 213.

20 Ibid., pp. 16-17.

21 [William Dean Howells] "The
Worst of Being Poor," Harper's
Weekly, XLVI (1902), 261.

22 Henry George, Progress and Pov-
erty (Twenty-fifth Anniversary Edi-
tion, New York, 1911), p. 557.

23 B. Seebohm Rowntree, Poverty. A
Study of Town Life (London,
1901), p. 305; and Simon N. Patten,
The New Basis of Civilization
(New York, 1907), pp. 3-27, par-
ticularly pp. 9-10.

24 Walter Lippman, Drift and Mas-
tery. An Attempt to Diagnose the
Current Unrest (New York, 1914),
p. 253.

25 Robert W. Bruere, "The Good
Samaritan, Incorporated," Harper's
Monthly Magazine, CXX (1910),
833.

26 Walter Weyl, The New Democ-
racy. An Essay on Certain Political
and Economic Tendencies in the
United States (New York, 1912),
pp. 197-98.

27 Edward T. Devine, Social Forces
(New York, 1910), p. 90; and Hol-
lander, Abolition of Poverty, p. 18.

28 United States. Commission on In-
dustrial Relations, Industrial Rela-
tions. Final Report and Testimony
... (11 vols., Washington, 1916),
I, 22.

29 On this point see J. G. Phelps
Stokes, "Report of the Committee
on Preventive Social Work," Pro-

Notes

291

ceedings of the New York State
Conference of Charities and Cor-
rection, 1903, p. 222.

30 See, for example, Simon N. Patten,
"The Principles of Economic In-
terference," The Survey, XXII
(1909), 16.

31 Robert W. Bruere, "The Conquest
of Poverty. A Socialist Solution of
the Problem," Metropolitan Maga-
zine, XXXIII (1909-10), 655; and
W. P. Capes, The Social Doctor
(New York, 1913), p. 91.

32 J. G. Phelps Stokes, "Ye Have the
Poor Always with You," The In-
dependent, LVII (1904), 730.

33 See comments on this point in
Hollander, The Abolition of Pov-
erty, p. 16.

34 Bruere, "The Good Samaritan," p.
833.

35 John Simpson Penman, Poverty;
The Challenge to the Church (Bos-
ton, 1915), p. 3.

36 Hunter, Poverty, p. 98.

37 Bailey Millard, "What Life Means
to Me," Cosmopolitan Magazine,
XLI (1906), 516.

38 Charles Edward Russell, Bare Hands
and Stone Walls, Some Recollec-
tions of a Side-Line Reformer (New
York, 1933), p. 135.

39 This point is made by Lippman in
Drift and Mastery, p. 5.

40 Gustavus Myers, History of the
Great American Fortunes (3 vols.,
Chicago, 1910); and William Allen
White, A Certain Rich Man (New
York, 1909).

41 Russell, Bare Hands and Stone
Walls, p. 136.

42 Ernest Crosby, "Wall Street and
'Graft,' " Cosmopolitan Magazine,
XLII (1907), 440.

43 Rauschenbusch, Christianity and the
Social Crisis, p. 308.

44 Washington Gladden, Recollections
(Boston, 1909), p. 404.

45 Millard, "What Life Means to Me,"
p. 516.

46 Alfred Henry Lewis, David Gra-
ham Phillips, et al., "The Day of
Discontent," Cosmopolitan Maga-
zine, XL (1906), 609.

47 Harry Lee and William H. Matth-
ews, Little Adventures with John
Barleycorn (New York, 1916).

48 Mary E. Richmond, Friendly Visit-
ing Among the Poor. A Handbook
for Charity Workers (New York,
1899), p. 11.

49 Rauschenbusch, Christianity and the
Social Crisis, p. 308.

50 Frank Julian Warne, "The Con-
quest of Poverty. The Program of
the Labor Unions," Metropolitan
Magazine, XXXIII (1909-10), 348.

51 C. J. Bushnell, "Causes and Condi-
tions of Social Need" in Charles
Richmond Henderson, Modern
Methods of Charity (New York,
1904), p. 385.

52 United States. Commission on In-
dustrial Relations, Industrial Rela-
tions. Final Report and Testimony,
I, 22.

53 Supreme Court of the United States,
October Term, 1914, Nos. 507 and
508. Frank C. Stealer v. Edwin
V. O'Hara et al., and Elmira Simp-
son v. Edwin V. O'Hara et al.
Brief for Defendants in Error, pp.
248 and 225-52.

Robert Coit Chapin, The Standard
of Living Among Workingmen's
Families in New York City (New
York, 1909), p. 250.
Scott Nearing, Poverty and Riches.
A Study of the Industrial Regime
(Philadelphia, 1916), p. 190.

56 The quotations are from ibid., p.
195, and Rauschenbusch, Christian-
ity and the Social Crisis, p. 217.
See, for example, Warne, "The
Conquest of Poverty," p. 348.
Henry Rogers Seager, Social Insur-
ance. A Program of Social Reform
(New York, 1910), pp. 17-18.

59 Hunter, Poverty, p. 63.

60 R. H. Tawney, Poverty as an In-

Notes

292

dustrial Problem (London, 1913),
pp. 11-12.

61 Edward T. Devine, When Social
Work Was Young (New York,
1939), p. 115. For a fuller statement
of this point of view see Devine,
"The Dominant Note of the Mod-
ern Philanthropy," Proceedings of
the National Conference of Chari-
ties and Correction, 1906, pp. 1-10.

62 Hollander, The Abolition of Pov-
erty, pp. 106-7 and 113.

63 "The Struggle against Social Des-
potism," The Outlook, LXXXII
(1906), 804-5.

64 Bessie Marsh and Charles Edward
Russell, "The Cry of the Slums,"
Everybody's Magazine, XVI (1907),
35.

65 Russell Sage Foundation, Boyhood
and Lawlessness, p. 9.

*6 Ruth S. True, The Neglected Girl,
p. 21.

67 Hunter, Poverty, pp. 64, 328, and
338-39; and Lee K. Frankel, "Needy
Families in Their Homes," Pro-
ceedings of the National Confer-
ence of Charities and Correction,
1906, pp. 331-32.

See, for example, J. G. Phelps
Stokes, "Report of the Committee
on Preventive Social Work," Pro-
ceedings of the New York State
Conference of Charities and Cor-
rection, 1903, pp. 221-30.

69 Lee K. Frankel, "The Relation Be-
tween Standards of Living and
Standards of Compensation," Pro-
ceedings of the New York State
Conference of Charities and Cor-
rection, 1906, p. 31.

70 Hunter, Poverty, pp. 328 and 340;
see also True, The Neglected Girl,
p. 16.

71 Frankel, "The Relation Between
Standards of Living and Standards
of Compensation," p. 31.

72Tawney, Poverty as an Industrial
Problem, p. 11.

73 Ibid., p. 10; Devine, "The Dominant
Note of the Modern Philanthropy,"
p. 3; and Rev. John A. Ryan, "The
Standard of Living and the Prob-
lem of Dependency," Proceedings
of the National Conference of
Charities and Correction, 1907, p.
347.

CHAPTER 9

A Factual Generation

xRay Stannard Baker, American
Chronicle (New York, 1945), p.
183.

2 "The Man Who Gave Us the
Word 'Graft,'" The Literary Di-
gest, XXXIV (1907), 173; and Louis
Filler, Crusaders for American
Liberalism (Yellow Springs, Ohio,
1950), p. 67.

8Josiah Flynt, "The American
Tramp," The Contemporary Re-
view, LX (1891), 254.

4Josiah Flynt, Tramping with

Tramps. Studies and Sketches of
Vagabond Life (New York, 1901),
p. 138.

5 Ibid., p. ix.

6 Quite a different conclusion, as
regards the unhealthfulness of the
lodginghouses, was reached by
Paul Kennaday, secretary of the
Committee on Prevention of Tuber-
culosis of the New York C.O.S., in
"New York's Hundred Lodging-
Houses," Charities, XIII (1905),
486-92.

Notes

293

7 Owen Kildare, My Old Bailiwick
(New York, 1906), p. 123.

8 Ibid., p. 121.

9 Ibid., p. 122.

10 Walter A. Wyckoff, The Workers,
An Experiment in Reality. The East
(New York, 1897), p. vii.

11 Lillian Pettengill, Toilers of the
Home. The Record of a College
Woman's Experience as a Domestic
Servant (New York, 1903), p. viii.

12 See, for example: S. H. B. "Street
Begging in New York," Charities,
IV (1900), 2-5; Theodore Waters,
"Six Weeks in Beggardom in an
Attempt to Solve the Question,
'Shall We Give to Beggars?,'"
Everybody's Magazine, XII (1905),
69-78; Alexander Irvine, From the
Bottom Up (New York, 1910), pp.
256-71; E. A. Brown, Broke (Chi-
cago, 1913); and Frances A. Kellor,
Out of Work. A Study of Employ-
ment Agencies: Their Treatment of
the Unemployed and Their Influ-
ence upon Homes and Business
(New York, 1905).

13 Jack London, The People of the
Abyss (New York, 1903), is a re-
port of the author's exploration of
the underworld of London in the
disguise of a bum.

14 Mrs. John Van Vorst and Marie
Van Vorst, The Woman Who
Toils. Being the Experiences of
Two Gentlewomen as Factory Girls
(New York, 1903), p. 267.

15 Charles B. Spahr, America's Work-
ing People (New York, 1900). This
work, which first appeared in The
Outlook in 1899 and 1900, is of
interest mainly because Spahr ex-
amined labor problems in communi-
ties in different stages of economic
development. The most informative
part of the book is the chapter on
Homestead entitled "The Iron Cen-
ters."

16 Anthracite Coal Strike Commission,
Report to the President on the

Anthracite Coal Strike of May-
October, 1902 (Washington, 1903);
for one of many magazine articles
inspired by the strike see Ray Stan-
nard Baker, "The Right to Work,
The Story of the Non-striking
Miners," McClure's Magazine, XX
(1903), 323-36.

17 Peter Roberts, Anthracite Coal
Communities (New York, 1904).

18 The Atlanta University research
program, which originated in 1896,
is briefly explained in W. E. Burg-
hardt DuBois and Augustus Gran-
ville Dill, The Negro American
Artisan (Atlanta, 1912), pp. 5-6.
Mary White Ovington's research
for Half a Man, The Status of the
Negro in New York (New York,
1911), began in 1904; Miss Oving-
ton contributed to "The Negro in
the Cities of the North," Charities,
XV (1905-6), 1-96, and to "The
Industrial Condition of the Negro
in the North," The Annals, XXVII
(1906), 541-609. For an early study
of the problem see "Condition of
the Negro in Various Cities," Bul-
letin of the Department of Labor,
II (1897), 251-309.

19 U. S. Bureau of Labor, The Italians
in Chicago. A Social and Economic
Study (Washington, 1897); "The
Italians in America," Charities, XII
(1904), 443-504; and "The Slav in
America," Charities, XIII (1904-5),
189-266.

20 Among the more important of the
early settlement studies were Hull-
House Maps and Papers (New
York, 1895); Robert A. Woods,
ed. The City Wilderness (Boston,

1899) and Americans in Process
(Boston, 1902); and Ernest Poole,
The Plague in Its Stronghold (New
York, 1903).

21 See, for example, Robert Hunter,
Tenement Conditions in Chicago
(Chicago, 1901).

22 On the C.O.S. Tenement House

Notes

294

Exhibition of 1900 see Robert W.
De Forest and Lawrence Veiller,
eds., The Tenement House Problem
Including the Report of the New
York State Tenement House Com-
mission of 1900 (2 vols., New York,
1903), I, 111-15; John G. Hill, Fifty
Years of Social Action on the
Housing Front (a mimeographed
report, apparently prepared in 1948,
in the archives of the Community
Service Society of New York), pp.
3-7; Lillian W. Betts, "The Tene-
ment House Exhibit," The Outlook,
LXIV (1900), 589-92; and Jacob
A. Riis, "The Tenement House Ex-
hibition," Harper's Weekly, XLIV
(1900), 104.

23 On De Forest and Veiller see Ed-
ward T. Devine, When Social
Work Was Young (New York,
1939), pp. 25-26 and 70-75.

24 De Forest and Veiller, eds., The
Tenement House Problem, I, 10.

25 In 1901 the legislature passed a new
tenement-house law drafted by
Veiller and other members of the
Commission. Meanwhile, the char-
ter of New York City was amended
to provide for the establishment of
a Tenement House Department,
which was given sole responsibility
for regulatory functions formerly
distributed among several different
bureaus. In the administration of
Mayor Seth Low, De Forest and
Veiller served respectively as Com-
missioner and Deputy Commissioner
of the new department. Devine,
When Social Work Was Young,
pp. 76-77.

26 Robert Hunter, Poverty (New
York, 1904), p. 11.

27 Ibid., p. 12.

28 William Graham Sumner, What
Social Classes Owe to Each Other
(New York, 1883), pp. 19-20.

29 John A. Ryan, A Living Wage. Its
Ethical and Economic Aspects
(New York, 1906), p. 136.

30 Ibid., p. 148.

31 The following are among the more
important of the prewar studies of
the cost of living and wage earners*
budgets: Eighteenth Annual Report
of the Commissioner of Labor,
1903. Cost of Living and Retail
Prices of Food (Washington, 1903 ) ;
Louise Bolard More, Wage Earners'
Budgets (New York, 1907); and
Robert Coit Chapin, The Standard
of Living Among Workingmerts
Families in New York City (New
York, 1909). See also Maurice Par-
melee, Poverty and Social Progress
(New York, 1920), pp. 87-91.

32 Ryan, A Living Wage, p. 162.

33 The findings of various prewar
wage studies are summarized in
Parmelee, Poverty and Social Prog-
ress, pp. 65-72. For later treatment
of the problem see Paul H. Doug-
las, Real Wages in the United
States, 1890-1926 (Boston, 1930),
pp. 390-95.

34 Devine, When Social Work Was
Young, p. 110.

35 "The Negro in the Cities of the
North," Charities, XV (1905-6),
1-96; and "Next Door to Congress,"
Charities and the Commons, XV
(1905-6), 759-841.

36 Devine, When Social Work Was
Young, p. 111.

37 On the origins and progress of the
survey see ibid., pp. 112-13; John
M. Glenn, Lilian Brandt, and F.
Emerson Andrews, Russell Sage
Foundation, 1901-1946 (2 vols.,
New York, 1946), I, 210-13; and
Paul U. Kellogg, "The Pittsburgh
Survey," Charities and the Com-
mons, XXI (1908-9), 517-26.

38 For explanation of the general cov-
erage of the survey see Kellogg,
"The Pittsburgh Survey," p. 518;
and Shelby M. Harrison, The Social
Survey. The Idea Defined and Its
Development Traced (New York,
1931), pp. 15-16. Among the topics
covered in the investigation were:
wages, hours of work, and work

Notes

accidents; family budgets and home
conditions among steel workers;
typhoid fever and other problems
relating to community health and
sanitation; housing; taxation; public
schools; city planning; playgrounds;
and care of dependent children in
institutions.

39 For the entire report see Paul U.
Kellogg, The Pittsburgh Survey (6
vols., New York, 1909-14). The
findings of the survey were sum-
marized in Edward T. Devine,
"The Pittsburgh Survey," Charities
and the Commons, XXI (1908-9),
1035-36.

40 Jane Addams, The Second Twenty
Years at Hull House, September
1909 to September 1929 (New York,
1930), p. 10.

41 Robert W. De Forest, "The Initial
Activities of the Russell Sage Foun-
dation," The Survey, XXII (1909),
71.

42 Glenn, Brandt and Andrews, Rus-
sell Sage Foundation, I, 177-90;
Harrison, The Social Survey, pp.
16-17.

43 "Birmingham. Smelting Iron Ore
and Civics," The Survey, XXVII
(1911-12), 1451-1556. John A. Fitch,
"The Human Side of Large Out-
puts. Steel and Steel Workers in
Six American States," The Survey,
XXVII (1911-12), 929-45, 1145-60,
1285-98, 1527-40; and XXVIII
(1912), 17-27. For comment on
the steel survey see Edward T.
Devine, "Pittsburgh in Perspective,"
The Survey, XXVII (1911-12),
917-18.

44 Orrin G. Cocks, "The Scope and
Value of the Local Surveys of the
Men and Religion Movement," Pro-
ceedings of the Academy of Politi-
cal Science in the City of New
York, III, 537-44.

45 See Lillian D. Wald, The House
on Henry Street (New York, 1915),
pp. 293-97, for comment on the
work of the New York State Immi-

295

gration Commission. On the Illinois
Occupational Disease Commission
see Alice Hamilton, Exploring the
Dangerous Trades (Boston, 1943),
pp. 118-21.

46 For discussion of the importance of
this report see Filler, Crusaders for
American Liberalism, p. 167; and
Elting E. Morison, ed., The Letters
of Theodore Roosevelt (8 vols.,
Cambridge, Mass., 1951-54), V,
176-77, and 294-96.

47 U.S. Bureau of Labor, Report on
Condition of Woman and Child
Wage Earners in the United States
(19 vols., Washington, 1910-13),
XVIII, 136.

48 Josephine Goldmark, Impatient Cru-
sader, Florence Kelley's Life Story
(Urbana, 111., 1953), pp. 102-3.

49 "Tenement Houses— Their Wrongs,"
New York Daily Tribune, Novem-
ber 23, 1869, p. 4.

50 The establishment of the Children's
Bureau is discussed below, Chapter
12. On the early work of the
agency see Grace Abbott, "Ten
Years' Work for Children," The
North American Review, CCXVIII
(1923), 189-200; and James A. To-
bey, The Children's Bureau. Its
History, Activities and Organiza-
tion (Baltimore, Md., 1925), pp.
3-4.

61 Edward T. Devine, Organized
Charity and Industry (New York,
1915), pp. 3-4.

52 United States. Commission on In-
dustrial Relations, Industrial Rela-
tions. Final Report and Testimony
(11 vols., Washington, 1916), I, 6.

53 Ibid., I, 22. Manly referred to com-
bined family income rather than to
individual earnings.

54 Ibid., I, 30.

55 See, for example, the statement of
Margaret Dreier Robins, ibid., I,
309-19.

56 Frances A. Kellor, Out of Work. A
Study of Unemployment (New
York, 1915), pp. 23-26.

Notes

296

87 Ibid., pp. 2-3.

58 Ibid., pp. 20-23. For comment on a
study of unemployment made by
the Bureau of Labor Statistics in
1915 see Douglas, Real Wages in

the United States, 1890-1926, pp.
412-15.
59 R. H. Tawney, Poverty as an In-
dustrial Problem (London, 1913), p.
9.

CHAPTER 10

The Literary Record

1 The American Monthly Review of
Reviews, XIX (1899), 749.

2 Ibid.; and see also critical comment
quoted in Ernest Marchand, Frank
Norris. A Study (Stanford Univer-
sity, Calif., 1942), pp. 201-4.

3 James L. Ford, Forty-Odd Years in
the Literary Shop (New York,
1921), p. 125.

4 Frank Norris, The Responsibilities
of the Novelist and Other Literary
Essays (New York, 1903), p. 215.

5 Alice Hegan Rice, The Inky Way
(New York, 1940), p. 39.

6 Owen Kildare, The Good of the
Wicked and the Party Sketches
(New York, 1904), unnumbered
p. 4.

7Myra Kelly, "The Uses of Adver-
sity" in Little Citizens. The Hu-
mors of School Life (New York,
1904), pp. 35-63.

8 Vachel Lindsay, "The Knight in
Disguise" in General William Booth
Enters into Heaven and Other
Poems (New York, 1924), p. 52.

9 O. Henry, "The Cop and the An-
them," in The Four Million (Gar-
den City, N. Y., 1919), p. 100.

10 "The Furnished Room," ibid., p.
240.

11 "An Unfinished Story," ibid., p.
180.

12 Quoted in F. O. Matthiessen, Theo-
dore Dreiser (New York, 1951),
pp. 60 and 112.

13 On this point see ibid., pp. 159-63;
Theodore Dreiser, The "Genius"

(Garden City, N. Y., n.d.), pp. 89,
110, and 236; Joseph J. Kwiat,
"Dreiser and the Graphic Artist,"
American Quarterly, III (1951),
140-41; and Cyrille Arnavon, "The-
odore Dreiser and Painting," Amer-
ican Literature, XVII (1945), 113-
26.

Dreiser, "The City Awakes" in The
Color of a Great City (New York,
1923), p. 5.

15 "Six O'Clock," ibid., p. 82.

16 Quoted in Matthiessen, Theodore
Dreiser, p. 230.

17 Dreiser, Sister Carrie (Modern Li-
brary edition, New York, 1932),
p. 64.

18 Dreiser, Jennie Gerhardt (New
York, 1911), pp. 3, 111, and 158.

19 Dreiser, "Bums" in The Color of a
Great City, pp. 35 and 37.

20 Dreiser, Sister Carrie, pp. 545 and
554.

21 Dreiser, A History of Myself. News-
paper Days (New York, 1931), p.
487.

22 Dreiser, "Peter" in Twelve Men
(New York, 1919), pp. 8-9.

23 Dreiser, "W.L.S.," ibid., pp. 320. See
also Dreiser, "The Color of Today,"
Harper's Weekly, XLV (1901),
1273.

24 Frank Norris, The Octopus. A Story
of California (New York, 1924),
pp. 651-52.

25 Carl Sandburg, Smoke and Steel
(New York, 1920), p. 5.

26 William Vaughn Moody, "Glou-

Notes

297

cester Moors," Scribner's Magazine,
XXVIII (1900), 727-28.

27 Moody, "The Brute," The Atlantic
Monthly, LXXXVII (1901), 88.

28 Robert Herrick, A Life for a Life
(New York, 1910), pp. 267-68.

29 Upton Sinclair, The Jungle (New
York, 1946), p. 60.

30 "The Candle Seller" in "Poems by
Morris Rosenfeld," trans, by Rose
Pastor Stokes and Helena Frank,
Survey, XXXII (1914), 268.

31 Reginald Wright KaufTman, The
House of Bondage (New York,
1910), p. 106.

32 Morris Rosenfeld, Songs of Labor
and Other Poems, trans, by Rose
Pastor Stokes and Helena Frank
(Boston, 1914), pp. 7-9.

33 Jack London, Martin Eden (New
York, 1909), p. 158.

34 Carl Sandburg, "The Right to
Grief" in Chicago Poems (New
York, 1916), pp. 25-26.

35 Sinclair, The Jungle, pp. 57-58 and
60.

36 Lewis Jacobs, The Rise of the
American Film. A Critical History
(New York, 1939), pp. 46-48 and
71.

37 On early movies dealing with pov-
erty see ibid., pp. 69-72; and Lloyd
Morris, Not So Long Ago (New
York, 1949), pp. 46-47.

38 Vachel Lindsay, "The Leaden-
Eyed," Collected Poems (New
York, 1927), pp. 69-70.

39 The quotation is from Matthiessen,
Theodore Dreiser, p. 219. For a

good example of the writers' tend-
ency to present the fruits of mate-
rial success as unsatisfactory see
Abraham Cahan, The Rise of David
Levinsky (New York, 1917).

40 Jack London, "What Life Means
to Me," Cosmopolitan Magazine,
XL (1905-6), 526.

41 London, Martin Eden, pp. 158, 256,
and 259.

42 London, "What Life Means to Me,"
pp. 529-30.

43 "Introduction by Jack London," in
The Cry for Justice, An Anthology
of the Literature of Social Protest,
ed. by Upton Sinclair (Philadel-
phia, 1915), p. 4.

44 Albert Edwards (pseud. Arthur
Bullard), A Man's World (New
York, 1912), p. 105.

45 Life, XL VIII (1906), 609.

46 Quoted in Sinclair, ed., The Cry
for Justice, pp. 244-46. The emer-
gence of literary radicalism after
1910 is discussed in Lillian Symes
and Travers Clement, Rebel Amer-
ica. The Story of Social Revolt in
the United States (New York,
1934), pp. 265-67. For comments
on the development of the prole-
tarian novel in the United States see
Donald Drew Egbert and Stow
Persons, eds., Socialism and Ameri-
can Life (2 vols., Princeton, 1952),
II, 473 et seq.

47 Ernest Poole, The Harbor (New
York, 1915), p. 351.

48 Ibid., pp. 215-16 and 321.

49 Ibid., p. 15.

CHAPTER 11

Art for Life's Sake

1The Lay Figure, "On the Cult of
the Ugly," International Studio,
XXIV (1905), 374.

2Sadakichi Hartmann, "Plea for the

Picturesqueness of New York,"
Camera Notes, IV (1900), 91-92
and 94.
3 John Corbin, "The Twentieth Cen-

Notes

298

tury City," Scribner's Magazine,
XXXIII (1903), 259. This article
was illustrated with reproductions
of photographs by Alfred Stieglitz.

4 Quoted in "To Revive the Art of
Every-Day Life," The Literary Di-
gest, XXXIV (1907), 260.

5 "The Futility of American Art,"
The Independent, LXIV (1908),
266-68.

6 For a convenient summary of criti-
cal comment on the work of the
Henri group see J. G., "Brooklyn
Revives Memories of 'The Eight,' "
The Art Digest, XVIII (December
1, 1943), 12. See also Oliver W.
Larkin, Art and Life in America
(New York, 1949), pp. 334-36.

7 The Sun (New York), February 9,
1908, p. 8.

8 Samuel Swift, "Revolutionary Fig-
ures in American Art," Harper's
Weekly, LI (1907), 534; and "Spe-
cial Exhibition of Contemporaneous
Art," The Independent, LXIV
(1908), 200. See also Giles Edger-
ton, "The Younger American
Painters: Are They Creating a
National Art?", The Craftsman,
XIII (1908), 512-32.

9B. O. Flower, "The Vital Issue in
the Present Battle for a Great
American Art," The Arena, XXXIV
(1905), 480.

10 Robert Henri, The Art Spirit
(Philadelphia, 1923), pp. 222 and
248.

11 John Sloan, Gist of Art (New
York, 1939), p. 220.

12 Guy Pene Du Bois, Artists Say the
Silliest Things (New York, 1940),
p. 82. See also Helen Appleton
Read, "Introduction" to Whitney
Museum of American Art, New
York Realists, 1900-1914 (New
York, 1937), p. 8; Charles Wisner
Barrell, "The Real Drama of the
Slums as Told in John Sloan's
Etchings," The Craftsman, XV
(1909), 559-64; and Louis Baury,

"The Message of Proletaire," The
Bookman, XXXIV (1911), 399-413.

13 Jerome Myers, Artist in Manhattan
(New York, 1940), p. 131.

14 John Spargo, "George Luks . . .,"
The Craftsman, XII (1907), 607.
See also The Independent, LXIV
(1908), 200-1.

15 On the Shinn mural see "Everett
Shinn's Paintings of Labor in the
New City Hall at Trenton, N. J.,"
The Craftsman, XXI (1911-12),
385. For Sloan's attitude toward so-
cial criticism in art see Gist of Art,
p. 3; and Lloyd Goodrich and Rosa-
lind Irvine, John Sloan, 1811-1951
(New York, 1952), pp. 22 and 44.

16 The quoted phrase is from Charles
H. Camn, Art for Life's Sake (New
York, 1913), p. 18.

17 Spargo, "Eugene Higgins . . .," The
Craftsman, XII (1907), 136. For
biographical data on Higgins see
Edward H. Smith, "Eugene Hig-
gins: Painter of the Underworld,"
The World Magazine (New York),
April 13, 1919, p. 9; and Dorothy
M. Oldach, Eugene Higgins (Brook-
lyn, 1939).

18 Myers, Artist in Manhattan, p. 48.

19 Quoted in Baury, "The Message of
Proletaire," p. 412.

20 Quoted in Smith, "Eugene Higgins:
Painter of the Underworld," p. 9.

21 Spargo, "Charles Haag . . .," The
Craftsman, X (1906), 433.

22 Crystal Eastman, "Charles Haag. An
Immigrant Sculptor of His Kind,"
Charities and the Commons, XVII
(1906-7), 615-16.

23 For example of Ker's Life style see
Life, XLV (1905), 122, 134; and
XLVI (1905), 206-7, 560-61, and
682-83.

24 Quoted in Art Young, Art Young,
His Life and Times (New York,
1939), p. 268.

25 See Advertisement in Life, XLIX
(1907), 698. Ker's picture is repro-
duced under the title "The Hand

Notes

299

of Fate" in Upton Sinclair, ed., The
Cry for Justice (Philadelphia, 1915),
facing p. 92; and under the title
"From the Depths" in Harold U.
Faulkner, The Quest for Social
Justice, 1898-1914 (New York,
1931), Plate I. Ker's illustrations
for The Silent War were discussed
by contemporary critics in The
Outlook, LXXXIV (1906), 682, and
The Arena, XXXVII (1907), 446-
47.

26 Quoted in Baury, "The Message of
Proletaire," p. 413. "King Canute"
is reproduced in Sinclair, ed., The
Cry for Justice, facing p. 93.

27 Young, The Best of Art Young
(New York, 1936), p. xvi.

28 Quoted in Goodrich and Irvine,
John Sloan, p. 47.

29 The drawings referred to were first
published in The Masses, I (Octo-
ber, 1911), 12, and IV (May, 1913),
15.

30 Young, Art Young. His Life and
Times, p. 262.

The drawings cited in this para-
graph are reproduced ibid., p. 259
("American Mothers"); The Best
of Art Young, p. 29 ("Poverty De-
velops Character"), p. 30 ("Holy

Trinity"), and p. 51 ("Pigs and
Children"). For other examples of
Young's cartoons attacking child
labor see The Best of Art Young,
pp. 36-37.

32 Young, Art Young. His Life and
Times, p. 244.

33 Charles F. Weller, "Neglected
Neighbors," Charities and the
Commons, XV (1905-6), 761-94.
See Chapter 9.

34 Beaumont Newhall, "Lewis W.
Hine," Magazine of Art, XXXI
(1938), 636-37. Hine's photographs
were used to illustrate publications
of The National Child Labor Com-
mittee including E. N. Clopper,
Child Labor in West Virginia (New
York, 1908), and A. J. McKelway,
Child Labor in the Carolinas (New
York, 1909).

35 Charles Edward Russell, "Unto the
Least of These," Everybody's Mag-
azine, XXI (1909), 75.

36Cafrm, Art for Life's Sake, p. 43;
and Henri, "Progress in Our Na-
tional Art . . .," The Craftsman, XV
(1909), 388.

37 Caffin, Art for Life's Sake, pp. 47
and 86.

CHAPTER 12

The Home and the Child

1 Robert Alston Stevenson, "The
Poor in Summer," Scribner's Maga-
zine, XXX (1901), 276.

2 New York C.O.S. Appeal for
Funds, June 1899. Stokes Papers.

3 Ernest Poole, The Plague in Its
Stronghold (New York, 1903), p.
26. See also Poole's Article, " 'The
Lung Block,' " Charities, XI (1903),
193-99.

4 This story is told by Maud Nathan

in Once upon a Time and Today
(New York, 1933), pp. 135-36.

5 Bessie Marsh and Charles Edward
Russell, "The Cry of the Slums,"
Everybody's Magazine, XVI (1907),
35.

6 Charles R. Henderson, The Social
Spirit in America (Chicago, 1905),
p. 62.

7 Housing surveys conducted be-
tween 1900 and 1919 are summa-

Notes

300

rized in Edith Elmer Wood, The
Housing of the Unskilled Wage
Earner. America's Next Problem
(New York, 1919), pp. 7-8. On
Albion Fellows Bacon see ibid., pp.
85-86; Helen Christine Bennett,
American Women in Civic Work
(New York, 1915), pp. 117-37; and
Albion Fellows Bacon, Beauty for
Ashes (New York, 1914).

8 Wood, Housing of the Unskilled
Wage Earner, p. 7.

9 Edith Abbott, The Tenements of
Chicago, 1908-1935 (Chicago, 1936),
p. 476.

10 Wood, Housing of the Unskilled
Wage Earner, p. 8.

11 Abbott, The Tenements of Chi-
cago, p. 480.

12 James L. Ford, The Literary Shop
and Other Tales (New York, 1899),
pp. 139-41. Gilder was editor of
The Century and, according to
Ford, one of the persons most re-
sponsible for keeping realistic fic-
tion dealing with low life out of
the magazines. For Gilder's letters
on the work of the Tenement
House Committee see Letters of
Richard Watson Gilder (Boston,
1916), pp. 254-93.

13 On the Big Flat, originally called
the "Workingmen's Home," see
Robert Hartley, Thirteenth An-
nual Report of the A.I.C.P. (New
York, 1856), pp. 44-51. The terri-
ble deterioration of this structure
is described in Frederick N. Owen,
"The Story of the 'Big Flat'" in
Forty-third Annual Report of the
A.I.C.P. (New York, 1886), pp.
43-73, an excellent example of
muckraking. The building was the
inspiration, although not the pre-
cise locale, of Julian Ralph's stories
of the "Big Barracks" in People We
Pass (New York, 1896).-Arthur
Bartlett Maurice, New York in Fic-
tion (New York, 1901), p. 64.

"On the Alfred T. White Tene-
ments see Wood, Housing of the

Unskilled Wage Earner, pp. 96-98.

15 Ibid., pp. 91-132; and Robert Hun-
ter, Tenement Conditions in Chi-
cago (Chicago, 1901), pp. 175-78.

16 Prior to joining Stanton Coit at the
University Settlement Charles B.
Stover managed the group of work-
ingmen's homes built in New York
City by a corporation organized in
1884 by Felix Adler and E. R. A.
Seligman. Gregory Weinstein, a
former resident, describes these
houses in The Ardent Eighties and
After (New York, 1947), pp. 89-90.

17 Henderson, The Social Spirit in
America, p. 63. The work of the
Octavia Hill Association of Phila-
delphia is described in Wood,
Housing of the Unskilled Wage
Earner, pp. 111-12.

18 Hunter, Tenement Conditions in
Chicago, pp. 166-67.

19 Wood, Housing of the Unskilled
Wage Earner, pp. 113-14.

20 See ibid., pp. 91-92 for comments
on the significance of the model-
housing movement. See also Ben-
jamin Park DeWitt, The Progres-
sive Movement (New York, 1915),
pp. 349-50.

21 The weaknesses of the early codes
are ably summarized in John G.
Hill, "Fifty Years of Social Action
on the Housing Front" (New York,
1948), p. 3. (Mimeographed report
in archives of Community Service
Society of New York).

22 For a charity agent's report of his
activity in this field see Howard
Kelsey Estabrook, Some Slums in
Boston (Boston, 1898) and a follow-
up study by the same author, "Ten-
ement Houses in Boston," Charities,
III (August 12, 1899), 4-6. In 1892
the New York A.I.C.P. established
a Department of Dwellings to make
inspections of dwellings for the
Metropolitan Board of Health.

23 On the New York law see Robert
W. DeForest and Lawrence Veiller,
eds., The Tenement House Problem

Notes

301

... (2 vols., New York, 1903) and
Hill, "Fifty Years of Social Action
on the Housing Front," pp. 7-8.
The provisions of the Chicago ordi-
nance of 1902 are outlined in Ab-
bott, The Tenements of Chicago,
pp. 59-61.

24 Wood, Housing of the Unskilled
Wage Earner, pp. 60-90; and Law-
rence Veiller, A Model Tenement
House Law (New York, 1910).

25 Abbott, The Tenements of Chi-
cago, pp. 480-82.

26 Ibid., p. 480.

27 Edith Elmer Wood, Recent Trends
in American Housing (New York,
1931), pp. 10-12. For a defense and
advocacy of "cold enforcement"
of the tenement-house laws see
Theodore Dreiser, The Color of a
Great City (New York, 1923), pp.
97-98.

28 Abbott, The Tenements of Chi-
cago, pp. 477-79.

29 Daniel Aaron, Men of Good Hope.
A Story of American Progressives
(New York, 1951), p. 45.

30 William Dean Howells, "An East
Side Ramble," in Impressions and
Experiences (New York, 1896), p.
149.

31 De Forest and Veiller, eds., The
Tenement House Problem, I, 44;
and Veiller, Housing Reform (New
York, 1911), pp. 77-84.

"Massachusetts, General Court.
House of Representatives Docu-
ment 2000. Report of the Home-
stead Commission (Boston, 1913),
p. 6.

33 U. S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Bulletin 158, Government Aid to
Home Owning and Housing of
Working People in Foreign Coun-
tries (Washington, 1914), pp. 9-10.

34 Report of the Proceedings of the
Thirty-Fourth Annual Convention
of the American Federation of La-
bor (Washington, 1914), p. 355.

35 Constitution of Massachusetts, Ar-
ticle of Amendment XLIII, ap-

proved November 2, 1915. See also
Article of Amendment XL VII, ap-
proved November 6, 1917. In 1913
the city of Cleveland, Ohio, pur-
chased a parcel of land to be laid
out in low-cost building sites—
Cleveland Plain Dealer, March 25,
1913; and The Public, XVI (1913),
346.
a6For an example of the close rela-
tionship between tenement-house
reform and the child-saving move-
ment see Massachusetts, General
Court. House Document 2000, Re-
port of the Homestead Commission,
p. 7.

37 This point is emphasized by Robert
Hunter in Poverty (New York,
1904), p. 191.

38 First Annual Report of the Chil-
dren's Aid Society of New York,
quoted in Charles Loring Brace,
The Dangerous Classes of New
York (New York, 1872), p. 322.

39 Edwin Markham, Ben B. Lindsey,
and George Creel, Children in
Bondage (New York, 1914), p. 151.

40 DeWitt, The Progressive Move-
ment, pp. 247-48.

41 Material on this point is volumi-
nous. For two of the many articles
bearing on it see Jane Addams,
"Child Labor and Pauperism," Pro-
ceedings of the National Confer-
ence of Charities and Correction,
1903, pp. 114-21; and Wilma I.
Ball, "Street Trading in Ohio," The
American Child, I (1919-20), 123-
29.

42 John Spargo, The Bitter Cry of the
Children (New York, 1906), p. 174.
This book stemmed from the con-
troversy aroused by Hunter's Pov-
erty. For interesting contemporary
comment on Spargo's work see
"The Struggle Against Social Des-
potism," The Outlook, LXXXII
(1906), 805.

43 S. W. Woodward, "A Business-
man's View of Child Labor," Char-

Notes

302

hies and the Commons, XV (1905-
6), 800-1.

44 Addams, "Child Labor and Pauper-
ism," p. 117.

45 Ernest Poole, The Street. Its Child
Workers (New York, 1903), p. 18.
See also Poole's article "Waifs of
the Street," McClure's Magazine,
XXI (1903), 43-44.

46 Quoted in Edward N. Clopper,
Child Labor in City Streets (New
York, 1913), pp. 64-65.

47 Hunter, Poverty, pp. 223 and 233.
See also Addams, "Child Labor and
Pauperism," p. 117.

48 On this point see Homer Folks,
Changes and Trends in Child Labor
and Its Control (New York, 1938),
p. 26.

49 Hunter, Poverty, p. 249.

50 Addams, "Child Labor and Pauper-
ism," p. 121.

51 Spargo, The Bitter Cry of the Chil-
dren, p. 147.

52 Felix Adler, The Attitude of So-
ciety Toward the Child as an Index
of Civilization (New York, 1907),
p. 5.

53 Addams, "Child Labor and Pauper-
ism," p. 121.

54 The phrases quoted are from Ed-
win Markham, "The Hoe-Man in
the Making," Cosmopolitan Maga-
zine, XLI (1906), 482.

55 Edgar Gardner Murphy, The Case
Against Child Labor (n.p., n.d.—
published by Executive Committee
on Child Labor in Alabama), p. 1.

56 The movement against child labor
in the South is treated in Elizabeth
H. Davidson, Child Labor Legisla-
tion in the Southern Textile States
(Chapel Hill, N. C, 1939). There is
a good brief discussion of the prob-
lem in C. Vann Woodward, Orig-
ins of the New South (Baton
Rouge, La., 1951), pp. 416-20. See
also Elizabeth Sands Johnson "Child
Labor Legislation" in John R.
Commons et al., History of Labor

in the United States (4 vols., New
York, 1918-35), III, 405-6, 414-15,
and 427-28.
57 Samuel Gompers, "Organized La-
bor's Attitude Toward Child La-
bor," The Annals, XXVII (1906),
339. For the influence of the
Knights of Labor on child-labor
legislation see Johnson, "Child La-
bor Legislation," p. 404.
Johnson, "Child Labor Legislation,"
p. 407. On the New York Child
Labor Committee see Josephine
Goldmark, Impatient Crusader,
Florence Kelley's Life Story (Ur-
bana, 111., 1953), pp. 81-87.
Edgar Gardner Murphy, "Child
Labor as a National Problem; with
Special Reference to the Southern
States," Proceedings of the National
Conference of Charities and Cor-
rection, 1903, p. 121.

60 On the organization of the Na-
tional Child Labor Committee see
Goldmark, Impatient Crusader, p.
92.

61 Johnson, "Child Labor Legislation,"
pp. 407-9.

62 Ibid., pp. 413-15 and 419-21.

63 Ibid., pp. 422-23; and Hunter, Pov-
erty, p. 235.

64 Florence Kelley, Obstacles to the
Enforcement of Child Labor Legis-
lation (New York, 1907), pp. 5-6.

65 Lillian Wald, The House on Henry
Street (New York, 1915), pp. 144-
45.

66 Johnson, "Child Labor Legislation,"
pp. 417-18; and Folks, Changes and
Trends in Child Labor and Its Con-
trol, p. 5.

67 Johnson, "Child Labor Legislation,"
p. 415.

68 Clopper, Child Labor in City Streets,
pp. 6-7. See also "Street Trades
Control in Toledo," The American
Child, V (August, 1923), 3.

69 Goldmark, Impatient Crusader, pp.
94-100, traces the origins of the
Children's Bureau movement. See

Notes

also James A. Tobey, The Chil-
dren}s Bureau. Its History, Activi-
ties and Organization (Baltimore,
1925), pp. 1-2.

70 37 United States Statutes 79 (1912).

71 On the early work of the Children's
Bureau see Grace Abbott, "Ten
Years' Work for Children," The
North American Review, CCXVIII
(1923), 189-200; and Grace Ab-
bott, The Child and The State (2
vols., Chicago, 1938), II, 612-15.

72 Proceedings of the Conference on
the Care of Dependent Children
(Washington, 1909), pp. 9-10 and
41 et seq.

73DeWitt, The Progressive Move-
ment, pp. 253-56.

74 Frank J. Bruno, Trends in Social
Work as Reflected in the Proceed-
ings of the National Conference of
Social Work (New York, 1948),
pp. 178-79.

75 See description of the experiments
conducted by the New York
A.I.C.P. after 1896 in making money
allowances to distressed families in
Community Service Society of New
York, Frontiers in Human Welfare
. . . (New York, 1948), p. 53.

76 Bruno, Trends in Social Work, pp.
177-78.

77 This is the point made in Karl de
Schweinitz, "The Development of
Governmental Responsibility for
Human Welfare." Address delivered
January 29, 1948, Symposium I of
the 100th Anniversary Program of
the Community Service Society of
New York (Archives of the Com-
munity Service Society of New
York).

78 In these sentences I have attempted
to state the views which seem to
me to be characteristic of men and
women such as Devine and Mrs.
Kelley. See, for example, Devine's
remarks at the White House Con-
ference of 1909, Proceedings of the

303

Conference on the Care of Depend-
ent Children, pp. 47-48.

79 Albert J. Beveridge, "Child Labor"
in The Meaning of the Times and
Other Speeches (Indianapolis, 1908),
p. 341. The Beveridge-Parsons Bill
of 1906 is printed in Abbott, The
Child and the State, I, 472-73.

80 U. S. Bureau of Labor, Report on
Condition of Woman and Child
Wage Earners in the United States
(19 vols., Washington, 1910-13), I,
9.

81 Folks, Changes and Trends in Child
Labor and Its Control, p. 18; and
Johnson, "Child Labor Legislation,"
pp. 438-39.

82 Johnson, "Child Labor Legislation,"
pp. 439-41. The law of September
1, 1916 (39 United States Statutes
675), is known as the Keating-
Owen Act. It went into effect
September 1, 1917.

83 Hammer v. Dagenhart, 247 U. S.
251 (1918). Lowell Mellett provides
some information on the later his-
tory of Reuben and John Dagen-
hart in "The Sequel to the Dagen-
hart Case," The American Child,
VI (January, 1924), 3. For interest-
ing comment on the decision see
Abbott, The Child and the State,
I, 463.

84 Bailey v. Drexel Furniture Co., 259
U. S. 20 (1922). For comment on
the decision see Elizabeth Brandeis,
"Labor Legislation," in Commons
et al., and Brandeis, History of La-
bor in the United States, III, 694-95.

85 The phrasing of the amendment is
discussed in Abbott, The Child and
the State, I, 536 and 544-46.

86 Johnson, "Child Labor Legislation,"
pp. 448-49.

87 Arguments against the amendment
are discussed ibid., pp. 446-48; Ab-
bott, The Child and the State, I,
537-35; Goldmark, Impatient Cru-
sader, pp. 117-18; and John A. Ryan,
Social Doctrines in Action. A Per-

Notes

304

sonal History (New York, 1941),
pp. 223-25.

88 Felix Adler, Child Labor in the
United States and Its Great Atten-
dant Evils (New York, 1905), p. 12.

89 Jane Addams, "Modern Devices for
Minimizing Dependencies," Pro-
ceedings of the Conference on the

Care of Dependent Children, pp.
99-101.
90 Folks, Changes and Trends in Child
Labor and Its Control, p. 27. Folks
was at this time (1938) chairman
of the National Child Labor Com-
mittee; he had for many years been
secretary of the New York State
Charities Aid Association.

CHAPTER 13

Women's Hours and Wages

1 Josephine C Goldmark, "The Nec-
essary Sequel of Child Labor Laws,"
The American Journal of Sociol-
ogy, XI (1905), 312-25.

2 For the feminist point of view see
Rheta C. Dorr, A Woman of Fifty
(New York, 1924), pp. 163-64 and
What Eight Million Women Want
(Boston, 1910).

3 Clara M. Beyer, History of Labor
Legislation for Women in Three
States. Bulletin of the Women's
Bureau, U.S. Department of Labor,
No. 66 (Washington, 1929), pp.
2-3.

4 Elizabeth Brandeis, "Labor Legisla-
tion" in John R. Commons et al.,
History of Labor in the United
States (4 vols., New York, 1918-
35), III, 457-66.

5 Ibid., pp. 466-67.

6 On Mrs. Kelley's career see Jose-
phine Goldmark, Impatient Crusa-
der, Florence Kelley's Life Story
(Urbana, 111., 1953); and autobio-
graphical sketches by Florence Kel-
ley in The Survey, LVII (1926-27),
7-11+, 557-61+, and LVIII (1927),
31-35, 271-74+.

7 Mrs. Kelley's philosophy is best ex-
pressed in her book, Some Ethical
Gains Through Legislation (New
York, 1905).

8 On the origin of the Consumers'
League see Beyer, History of Labor

Legislation for Women, pp. 69-70.
Maud Nathan, The Story of an
Epoch-Making Movement (New
York, 1926) is a history of the
movement by one of its early
leaders.
9 Brandeis' remark is quoted in Al-
pheus Thomas Mason, Brandeis, A
Free Man's Life (New York, 1946),
pp. 248-49.

10 Kelley, Some Ethical Gains
Through Legislation, p. 159; and
Josephine Goldmark, Fatigue and
Efficiency (New York, 1912), pp.
247-50.

11 See Goldmark, Fatigue and Effi-
ciency, Part II, for the substances
of the briefs prepared by Brandeis
and Miss Goldmark for Muller v.
Oregon and other cases involving
the hour laws of Ohio and Illinois.
Miss Goldmark tells the story of
the Brandeis brief in Impatient
Crusader, pp. 143-59; see also Ma-
son, Brandeis, A Free Marts Life,
pp. 248-52.

12 State of Illinois, Third Annual Re-
port of the Factory Inspectors of
Illinois, 189S (Springfield, 111.,
1896), p. 7. See also Kelley, Some
Ethical Gains Through Legislation,
p. 143.

13 Mason, Brandeis, A Free Marts
Life, p. 245.

^Ibid., p. 251.

Notes

305

15 Elizabeth Beardsley Butler, Women
and the Trades (New York, 1910),
p. 346.

16 Ibid., pp. 347-48.

17 Ibid., p. 349.

18 Mary Van Kleeck, "Working Hours
of Women in Factories," Charities
and the Commons, XVII (1906),
13-21.

19 See, for example, Mary Van Kleeck,
Artificial Flower Makers (New-
York, 1913) and Women in the
Bookbinding Trade (New York,
1913). On the pin-money theory
see also The Autobiography of
Mary Anderson as told to Mary N.
Winslow (Minneapolis, 1951), pp.
75 and 139.

20 John M. Glenn, Lilian Brandt, and
F. Emerson Andrews, Russell Sage
Foundation, 1901-1946 (2 vols.,
New York, 1947), I, 161.

21 U.S. Bureau of Labor, Report on
Condition of Woman and Child
Wage Earners in the United States
(19 vols., Washington, 1910-13),
V, 62.

22 Ibid., XVIII, 35-36.

23 Carl Sandburg, "Anna Imroth,"
Chicago Poems (New York, 1916),
p. 33. In The Nine-Tenths (New
York, 1911) James Oppenheimer
attempted a Actionized treatment
of the Triangle disaster. The earlier
waist makers' strike figures promi-
nently in Reginald Wright Kauff-
man, The House of Bondage (New
York, 1910).

24Brandeis, "Labor Legislation," p.
478; and Beyer, History of Labor
Legislation for Women, p. 7.

25 State of New York, Second Report
of the Factory Investigating Com-
mission (2 vols., Albany, 1913), I,
193-212.

26 People v. Charles Schiveinler Press,
214 New York 395 (1915). See also
Goldmark, Impatient Crusader, pp.
165-66; and Brandeis, "Labor Hour
Legislation," p. 480.

27 Mary Van Kleeck, Artificial Flower
Makers, pp. 72-73.

28 John A. Ryan, A Living Wage. Its
Ethical and Economic Aspects
(New York, 1906), pp. 301 et seq.
See also Ryan's essays "The Stand-
ard of Living and the Problem of
Dependency," Proceedings of the
National Conference of Charities
and Correction, 1907, p. 347, and
"Programme of Social Reform
by Legislation," Catholic World,
LXXXIX (1909), 433-44, 608-14.
Ryan proposed a legal minimum
wage for men as well as women.

29 Earlier experiments with minimum-
wage legislation in Australia and
New Zealand had not gone un-
noticed in the United States, but
the action of the British govern-
ment aroused more widespread and
serious attention. See, for example,
articles by Henry R. Seager and
Matthew B. Hammond in The An-
nals, XL VIII (1913), 3-12 and
22-36.

30 Goldmark, Impatient Crusader, pp.
134-39; and Beyer, History of La-
bor Legislation for Women, pp.
10-11.

31 George Kibbe Turner, "The Daugh-
ters of the Poor," McClure's Maga-
zine, XXXIV (1909-10), 45-61. See
also Louis Filler, Crusaders for
American Liberalism (Yellow
Springs, Ohio, 1950), pp. 285-95.

32 Butler, Women and the Trades, pp.
348-49.

33 Robert W. Bruere, "The Meaning
of the Minimum Wage," Harper's
Monthly Magazine, CXXXII (1915-
16), 276 and 282.

34 Goldmark, Impatient Crusader, p.
138; and Brandeis, "Labor Legisla-
tion," pp. 506-7 and 513-15.

35 Brandeis, "Labor Legislation," pp.
508-17.

™Stettler v. O'Hara, 243 U.S. 629
(1917). For the minimum- wage
brief see Louis D. Brandeis and
Josephine Goldmark, Brief for De-

Notes

306

fendants in Error, Supreme Court
of the United States, October
Term, 1914, Nos. 507 and 508
Frank C. Stettler v. Edwin V.
O'Hara et aL, and Elmira Simpson
v. Edwin V. O'Hara et aL, pp. 66-
397. For comment on the case see
Goldmark, Impatient Crusader, pp.
167-72, and Mason, Brandeis. A
Free Man's Life, pp. 252-53.

37 Brandeis, "Labor Legislation," p.
521.

38 Walter Lippmann, "The Campaign

Against Sweating," The New Re-
public, II (No. 21: March 27, 1915),
8.

39Adkins v. Children's Hospital, 261
U. S. 525 (1923).

40 For interesting comment on the
Adkins case see Goldmark, Impa-
tient Crusader, pp. 172-74. Frank-
furter's approach is expressed in his
article "Hours of Labor and Real-
ism in Constitutional Law," Har-
vard Law Review XXIX (1916),
353-73.

CHAPTER 14

The Common Welfare

1For interesting comment on Gom-
pers' philosophy and program see
John A. Fitch, "Samuel Gompers
and the Labor Movement," The
Survey, LXXXVI (1950), 289-92.

2 On division of opinion within the
A.F.L. on hour laws see ibid., p.
291; and Elizabeth Brandeis, "Labor
Legislation" in John R. Commons
et aL, History of Labor in the
United States (4 vols., New York,
1918-35), III, 555.

3 This was pointed out by W. Jett
Lauck in "The Underlying Causes
of Industrial Unrest," Locomotive
Engineers Journal, XLIX (1915),
1179-81.

4 See, for example, the remarks of
Joseph Tuckerman cited in Daniel
T. McColgan, Joseph Tuckerman,
Pioneer in American Social Work
(Washington, 1940), pp. 166-67.

5 Baer's views are stated in a letter
printed in Mark Sullivan, Our
Times. The United States, 1900-
192$ (6 vols., New York, 1926-35),
II, 425.

6 Raymond Robins, "The One Main
Thing," Proceedings of the Na-

tional Conference of Charities and
Correction, 1907, p. 326.

7 Proceedings of the Conference on
the Care of Dependent Children
(Washington, 1909), p. 77.

8 John A. Fitch, The Steel Workers
(New York, 1910), pp. 152-65.

9 Ibid., p. 5.
10 Ibid., p. 206.

Ibid., p. 220.
Ibid., p. 214.

13 Ibid., p. vi.

14 Frank J. Bruno, Trends in Social
Work as Reflected in the Proceed-
ings of the National Conference
of Social Work, 1874-1946 (New
York, 1948), pp. 157-61.

15 Lee K. Frankel and Miles M. Daw-
son, Workingmen's Insurance in
Europe (New York, 1910); and
Twenty-Fourth Annual Report of
the Commissioner of Labor, 1909.
Workingmen's Insurance and Com-
pensation Systems in Europe (2
vols., Washington, 1911).

16 Henry R. Seager, Social Insurance.
A Program of Social Reform (New
York, 1910).

17 Louis D. Brandeis, "Workingmen's

Notes

307

Insurance—The Road to Social Effi-
ciency," Proceedings of the Na-
tional Conference of Charities and
Correction, 1911, pp. 156-62; see
also Josephine Goldmark, Impatient
Crusader, Florence Kelley's Life
Story (Urbana, III, 1953), pp. 133-
34.

18 Owen R. Lovejoy, chairman, "Re-
port of the Committee on Stand-
ards of Living and Labor," Pro-
ceedings of the National Confer-
ence of Charities and Correction,
1912, pp. 376-94.

19 Jane Addams, The Second Twenty
Years at Hull House, September
1909 to September 1929 (New
York, 1930), p. 27; and Bruno,
Trends in Social Work, pp. 163
and 221-23.

20 E. H. Downey, Workmen's Com-
pensation (New York, 1924), pp.
143-44; and Harry Weiss, "Em-
ployers' Liability and Workmen's
Compensation" in Commons et al.,
History of Labor in the United
States, III, 565-67,

21 This movement is traced in Weiss,
"Employers' Liability and Work-
men's Compensation," pp. 567-69.

22 Downey, Workmen's Compensa-
tion, p. 145.

23 For typical popular indictments of
the employers' liability system see
Arthur B. Reeve, "Our Industrial
Juggernaut," Everybody's Magazine,
XVI (1907), 147-52; and William
Hard, Injured in the Course of
Duty (New York, 1910).

24Willard C. Fisher, "American Ex-
perience with Workmen's Com-
pensation" in John R. Commons,
ed., Trade Unionism and Labor
Problems (second series, Boston,
1921), p. 33. See also Frederick
L. Hoffman, Industrial Accidents
(Washington, 1908), p. 417.

25 Frederick L. Hoffman, Industrial
Accident Statistics (Washington,
1915), p. 6. For a somewhat higher

estimate see I. M. Rubinow, Social

Insurance (New York, 1913), pp.

54-55.
26 Hoffman, Industrial Accidents, p.

458.
27Ellery Sedgwick, "The Land of

Disasters," Leslie's Magazine, LVIII

(1904), 566.

28 The quotation is from Reeve, "Our
Industrial Juggernaut," p. 157.

29 Rubinow, Social Insurance, p. 61.

30 Hard, "Introduction" to Injured in
the Course of Duty, pages not num-
bered.

31 Miss Eastman's study covered 526
fatal accidents occurring between
July 1, 1906, and June 30, 1907; and
509 nonfatal accidents occurring in
three months of 1907.

32 Crystal Eastman, Work Accidents
and the Law (New York, 1910),
p. 165. For other discussions of the
causes of industrial accident, stress-
ing speed and fatigue as important
factors, see Fitch, The Steel Work-
ers, p. 67; and Rubinow, Social
Insurance, pp. 77-83.

33 Eastman, Work Accidents and the
Law, p. 128.

34 Ibid., p. 220.

35 Ibid., pp. 207-20, particularly pp.
207-9; and Weiss, "Employers' Lia-
bility and Workmen's Compensa-
tion," pp. 572-73.

36 Downey, Workmen's Compensa-
tion, p. 7.

37 Rubinow, Social Insurance, p. 55.

38 Eastman, Work Accidents and the
Law, p. 216.

39 Weiss, "Employers' Liability and
Workmen's Compensation," p. 575.

40 Rubinow, Social Insurance, pp.
161-62.

Weiss, "Employers' Liability and
Workmen's Compensation," p. 576.
Fisher, "American Experience with
Workmen's Compensation," p. 20,
reported that as of 1920 only the
railway unions continued to oppose
the compensation principle, appar-

Notes

308

ently because they felt the awards
were too low.

42 Downey, Workmen's Compensa-
tion, pp. 2-3.

43 Fisher, "American Experience with
Workmen's Compensation," p. 33.

44 Downey, Workmen's Compensa-
tion, p. 148.

45 Ibid., pp. 146-47; Weiss, "Employ-
ers' Liability and Workmen's Com-
pensation," p. 594; and Fisher,
"American Experience with Work-
men's Compensation," p. 43.

46 The best study of the fight against
occupational diseases is Alice Ham-

ilton, Exploring the Dangerous
Trades (Boston, 1943).
Downey, Workmen's Compensa-
tion, pp. 153-54.

48 Rubinow, Social Insurance, pp. 167-
68.

49 Ibid., p. 28.

50 Theodore Parker, Sermon on the
Perishing Classes in Boston (Boston,
1846), p. 10.

51 Seager, Social Insurance, pp. 15-17.

52 1. M. Rubinow, The Quest for Se-
curity (New York, 1934), p. 207
et seq.

CONCLUSION

The Price of Reform

1 The New York Times, October
23, 1928.

2 See, for example, Daisy Lee Worth-
ington Worcester, "The Standard
of Living," Proceedings of the Na-
tional Conference of Social Work,
1929, pp. 337-53.

3 Richard Hofstadter, The Age of
Reform. From Bryan to F.D.R.
(New York, 1955), pp. 301-3.

4 Joanna C. Colcord, "Social Work
and the First Federal Relief Pro-
grams," Proceedings of the National
Conference of Social Work, 1943,
pp. 382-94.

5 Harry L. Hopkins, "The Develop-
ing National Program of Relief,"
Proceedings of the National Con-
ference of Social Work, 1933, p. 67.

6 Samuel I. Rosenman, comp., The
Public Papers and Addresses of

Franklin D. Roosevelt (13 vols.,
New York, 1938-50), IV, 19-20.

7 Paul H. Douglas, Social Security
in the United States (New York
and London, 1936), p. 82. For an
interesting defense of one of the
more radical proposals for unem-
ployment insurance that was before
Congress at the same time as the
Social Security bill see Mary Van
Kleeck, "The Workers' Bill for
Unemployment," The New Repub-
lic, LXXXI (1934-5), 121-24.

8 Frank J. Bruno, Trends in Social
Work (New York, 1948), p. 309.

9 Rosenman, The Public Papers and
Addresses of Franklin D. Roose-
velt, VI, 4-5. On Roosevelt as an
"apostle of abundance" see David
M. Potter, People of Plenty. Eco-
nomic Abundance and the Ameri-
can Character (Chicago, 1954), p.
120.

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Index

Abbott, Edith, on tenement-house in-
vestigations, 206

Abbott, Lyman, 137

Abolition of Poverty, The (Hollan-
der), 125

Abundance, Idea of, 128-29; F. D.
Roosevelt, 265

Academie Julian, 194

Addams, Jane, 60, 154, 202, 219, 258,
269; on child labor, 214, 216; on
Pittsburgh survey, 156; on relation
of child-labor legislation to other
reforms, 228; on services performed
by settlement houses, 63-64; quoted,
63-64, 66

Ade, George, 115

Adkins v. Children's Hospital, 242-43

Adler, Felix, 219, 233; on Single Tax,
25; quoted, 216, 228

Alabama, 216, 217, 218; child-labor
law, 217-18

Alabama Child Labor Committee, 217

Aladdin Oven, 13

Albany, N.Y., 36

Alcott, Louisa May: on female labor,
75; Work, IS

Aldrich, Thomas Bailey: "Unguarded
Gates," 10; quoted, 10

Alger, Horatio, 20, 77

Allegheny County (Pa.), 154, 248, 254

Almsgiving, 18, 56, 124

Almshouses, 46; children in, 49-50;
conditions in, 48-50

American Association for Labor Leg-
islation, 239, 255, 259

American Charities. A Study in Phi-
lanthropy and Economics (War-
ner), 70, 270; quoted, 67

American Economic Association, 155,

270
American Epoch (Link), 271
American Federation of Labor, 223,
244, 245, 247; advocates government
subsidies for housing, 211; attitude
toward social legislation, 245; sup-
ports child-labor legislation, 225;
and workmen's compensation move-
ment, 255
American Medical Association, 225
"American Mothers" (Young), 196
American Notes (Dickens), 5
American Sociological Society, 155
American Union Commission, 43
America's Working People (Spahr),

148
Andrews, E. B., 84; quoted, 21, 25-26
Andrews, John B., 256, 259
Annals, The, 270
Anshutz, Thomas P.: "Steelworkers,

Noontime," 113
Applied Sociology (Ward), 126
Arena, The, 69, 188, 270
Art: American attitudes toward, 185-
86; and American scene, 108-9, 120,
186; "ash-can school," 187-91; and
Progressive movement, 198; and
public taste, 109-10; social criticism
in, 191ff.
Art and Life in America (Larkin), 271
Art Spirit, The (Henri), quoted, 185
Associated Charities, 51; Boston, 88.
See also Charity organization so-
cieties
Associations for Improving the Con-
dition of the Poor (A.I.C.P.), 51, 52
Astor Place riot, 90

347

Index

Atlanta, Ga., 156, 218
Atlanta University, 149
Atlantic Monthly, The, 94, 270

Bacon, Albion Fellows, 205

Baer, George F., 246

Baker, Benjamin A., 90

Baker, Ray Stannard, on muckraking
movement, 140

Ballinger-Pinchot controversy, 252

Baltimore, Md., 207

Baltimore Charity Organization So-
ciety, 56

Baptist Temple (Philadelphia), 59

Barnard, F., 115, 117

Barnett, Samuel A-, 60

Baur, John I. H.: Revolution and Tra-
dition in Modern American Art, 271

Beard, Dan, 116, 119; labor cartoon,
119

"Before the Break of Day" (Mat-
thews), quoted, 99

Beggars, 53, 101, 166

Bellamy, Edward: approach to pov-
erty, 102-3; rejects competition, 25

Bellevue Hospital Visiting Committee
(N.Y.), 50

Bemis, E. W., 74

Beveridge, Albert J., proposes federal
regulation of child labor, 223-24

"Big Flat," the (N.Y.), 207, 270

Birmingham, Ala., 157

Bitter Cry of the Children, The (Spar-
go), 137, 214

Bitter Cry of Outcast London, The
(London Congregational Union),
quoted, 46, 60

Blackwell's Island (N.Y.), 38, 69

Booth, Charles, influence on American
social research, 71

Booth, William, 29, 69; quoted, 29

Borden, Morton, xii

Boston, Mass., 5, 33, 34, 57, 70, 75,
207; slums, 69

Boston Society for the Prevention of
Pauperism, 20, 75

Boucicault, Dion, 90, 91

348

Bowery, the (N.Y.), 58, 104, 143, 144

Bowery Theater (N.Y.), 77

Boyhood and Lawlessness (Russell
Sage Foundation), 197; quoted, 127

Brace, Charles Loring, 38-41, 62, 92,
117, 269; attitude toward child la-
bor, 78; Children's Aid Society, 39-
40; The Dangerous Classes of New
York, 3, 269; on slum dwellers, 6;
quoted, 3, 39, 213

Brackett, Jeffrey R.: Supervision and
Education in Charities, 270

Braham, Dave, 97

Brandeis, Louis, 233, 242; advocates
social insurance, 249; brief in Muller
v. Oregon, 233-34, 237, 242; brief
for Oregon minimum wage law,
135, 240; on low wages, 135

Bremner, Catherine Marring, xi

Brisbane, Arthur, quoted, 195

Brook Farm, 61

Brooklyn, N.Y., 36, 207

Broome Street Tabernacle (N.Y.), 59,
60

Brown, John George, 110, 117; "Long-
shoremen's Noon," 113, 114; "Sym-
pathy," 110

Brown University, 21

Brownson, Orestes, 11, 20

Bruno, Frank J.: Trends in Social
Work, 270

"Brute, The" (Moody), 176

Bryan, William Jennings, 107, 110

Bryant, William Cullen, 95

Bryce, James, 109

Bullard, Arthur, 181, 183; Comrade
Yetta, 182; A Man's World, 181;
quoted, 181-82

Bums, 58, 143-45

Bunner, H. C, 98-99, 105; on slums,
98-99; "The Love Letters of Smith,"
99, 101

Buntline, Ned: approach to poverty,
89-90; Mysteries and Miseries of
New York, 89, 90. See also Judson,
E.Z.C.

Butler, Elizabeth Beardsley: Women
and the Trades, 234-35, 236; quoted,
239

Index

Caffin, Charles, quoted, 197-98
' Cahan, Abraham, 166

California, 145, 239

Campbell, Helen, 25, 76, 84; on child
labor, 79; on unemployment, 14

Capitalism, 265, 266

Care of Destitute, Neglected, and De-
linquent Children (Folks), 270

Carnegie, Andrew, 17, 20; gospel of
wealth, 31-32

"Case method," 55

Case workers. See Social workers

Castle Garden (N.Y.), 113

Catholic Charities of Brooklyn, 247

Catholic Church, 28, 57; attitude
toward poverty, 28; eleemosynary
enterprises, 34

Central Congregational Church (To-
peka, Kans.), 59

Century Magazine, 100

"Challenge, The" (Longfellow), quot-
ed, 86

Channing, William Ellery, 5, 83; and
Joseph Tuckerman, 33; quoted, 5,
33, 80

Chapin, Robert Coit, 135

Charities, 154, 270

Charities and the Commons, 154, 155,
157, 193, 196, 270

Charities Publication Committee, 154,
157, 170

Charity, 9, 19, 32-33, 54, 123, 124, 130,
266, 268; effect of Civil War on,
44; preferred to public relief, 50;
and preventive social work, 138;
schools, 32-33. See also Philanthropy

Charity agents. See Social workers

Charity organization movement, 51-
57, 60; attitude toward labor, 56-57;
contributions to social research, 55-
56; influence on attitudes toward
poverty, 56; attitude toward charity,
51, 57

Charity Organization Movement in
the United States (Watson), 270

Charity organization societies, 5 Iff.;
criticism of, 53-55; oppose public
outdoor relief, 53; program and
methods, 51-53

Chicago, 41, 61, 70, 141, 145

349

Chicago American, quoted, 7

Chicago Commons, 62, 63

Chicago Record, 115

Chicago, University of, 176, 205, 206;
School of Social Service, 209

Child labor, viii, 41, 76-77, 154, 212ff.,
260; in agriculture and domestic
service, 220; and "child saving"
movement, 213; federal regulation
of, 220, 223fT.; literary treatment
of, 101-2; popular attitudes toward,
77, 213-14; in Pennsylvania, 219-20;
reformers' arguments against, 214-
16; state regulation of (1904-14),
219-20; in Southern textile states,
216-18; in street trades, 220

Child-labor Amendment, 79, 226-28;
opponents' arguments, 227-28; sig-
nificance of rejection, 226-28

Child-labor legislation, 216, 230; be-
fore 1896, 77-78; exemptions and
loopholes in state, 220; Fair Labor
Standards Act (1938), 264-65; fed-
eral laws of 1916 and 1919, 225; fed-
eral regulation proposed, 223-25;
federal laws declared unconstitu-
tional, 225-26; New York law, 233;
in Northern states, 218; relation to
other reforms, 228-29; in Southern
textile states, 217-18; state laws in
1914, 225

"Child saving" movement, 212-13

Children's Aid Society (N.Y.), 6, 39-
40, 50, 78, 219; industrial schools,
62; placement work, 40

Children's Bureau. See United States
Children's Bureau

Christian Scientists, 259

Christian Socialists, 26

Christian Union, The, 78, 82

Christianity and the Social Crisis
(Rauschenbusch), 126; quoted, 260

Church of the Holy Communion
(N.Y.), 59

Cincinnati, Ohio, 207

City missionaries, 65

City missions, 57-59, 61

City and Suburban Homes Associa-
tion, 207

Index

350

City Temperance Society (N.Y.), 35

Civil War, 27, 46, 48, 75, 90, 93, 94;
effect on philanthropy, 42-44; pen-
sions issue, 23

Civilization's Inferno; or Studies in
the Social Cellar (Flower), 69, 118

Cleveland, Grover, quoted, 23

Cleveland Charity Organization So-
ciety, 54

Coal strike of 1902, 148, 246

Coffin, Lorenzo S., 74-75

Coit, Stanton, 60, 61, 63

Coles, Harry, xi

College Settlement (N.Y.), 63

Columbia University, 135, 219; Co-
lumbia College, 56

Colwell, Stephen, 27

Committee of Fifty for the Investiga-
tion of the Liquor Problem, 80-81

Commons, John R., 11, 56, 155;
quoted, 21

Commons, John R., et al.: History of
Labor in the United States, 271

Community Service Society of New
York, xi, 269

Compulsory-education laws, 78

Comrade Yetta (Bullard), 182

Confession literature, 141-42, 166

Connecticut, 145

"Conquest of Poverty, The," 271;
quoted, 123

Consumers' league movement, 76. See
also National Consumers' League

Conwell, Russell H., 59

Coolidge administration, 260

"Cop and the Anthem" (Henry),
168-69

Coquelin, 98

Corbin, John, 186

Cowley, Malcolm, 65

Craftsman, The, 270

Crane, Stephen, 55, 58, 108, 117; ap-
proach to poverty, 104, 105-6

Crime, 70, 90; literary treatment of,
102

Crosby, Ernest, quoted, 132

Cry for Justice, The (Sinclair), 271

"Cult of the Ugly," 186, 187

Cummings, A. I., quoted, 88

Dagenhart, John and Reuben, 225

Daily Graphic (N.Y.), 68, 114-15

Daly, Augustin, 90

Dangerous Classes of New York and
Twenty Years' Work Among
Them, The (Brace), 269; quoted, 3

Daughter of the Tenements, A
(Townsend), 117

"Daughters of the Poor, The" (Turn-
er), 239

Daumier, Honore, 191

Davidson, Marshall B.: Life in Amer-
ica, 271

Davis, Rebecca Harding: A Story of
To-day, quoted, 94

Davis, Richard Harding: approach to
poverty, 101-2; "Gallegher," 101-2;
"My Disreputable Friend, Mr. Rae-
gan," 102; "The Trailer for Room
No. 8," 102

Day, Clarence S., 52

De Forest, Robert M., 155, 219; The
Tenement House Problem, 150-51,
270; quoted, 156

Democracy and Aristocracy, or Rich
and Poor in New York, 90-91

Dependency, 123, 124, 125, 128, 130.
See also Pauperism

Depressions, 13-14, 132; (1819), 4, 13,
33; (1837), 4, 8-9, 12, 87; (1893),
22; (1907), 130, 197; (1930's), 261,
263, 265

Desperate Encounter, 179

Devine, Edward T., 154, 155, 159, 202,
219, 259, 269, 270; on effects of pov-
erty, 126; When Social Work Was
Young, 270; quoted, 129, 136

Dewey, Davis R., 74

Dickens, Charles, 5, 88-89, 91, 100,
117; American imitators of, 88, 89,
91; American Notes, 5; Bleak
House, 115, 117; description of Five
Points district, 5, 67; influence on
attitudes toward poverty, 88-89

District of Columbia, 154, 223, 255

Dore, Gustav, 194-95

Dowling, George T.: approach to
poverty, 96; The Wreckers: A So-
cial Study, 22, 27, 96; quoted, 96

Index

351

Drake, W. H., 116

Dreiser, Theodore, 170-74, 180, 181;
attitude toward poverty, 170-71;
Jennie Gerhardt, 170, 172; Sister
Carrie, 170, 171-72, 173; on social
contrasts, 173; on tramps, 172-73;
quoted, 174

Du Bois, W. E. B., 149

Du Bois, W. E. B., and A. G. Dill:
The Negro Artisan, quoted, 140

Dugdale, Robert L.: The Jukes, 70

Dulles, Foster Rhea, xi

Eakins, Thomas, 110, 111, 112; "The
Gross Clinic," 111-12

Eastman, Crystal, 270; on Charles
Haag, 193; Work Accidents and the
Law, 253-54; quoted, 253, 255

"East-Side Ramble, An" (Howells),
55, 210

Economics, new spirit in study of,
128

Economist, The (Hartley), 37

Edinburgh, Scotland, 9

Edwards, Albert. See Bullard, Arthur

Egbert, Donald, and Stow Persons:
Socialism and American Life, 271

Eggleston, Edward, 23; describes
poorhouse, 48, 50; The Hoosier
Schoolmaster, 271; quoted, 24

Eleventh Hour, The, 179

Ellis Island, 197

Elsing, William T., 70

Ely, Richard T., 56; attempts to ascer-
tain number of paupers in U. S., 72;
quoted, 29

Emerson, Ralph Waldo, quoted, 16, 87

Employers' liability: common-law
rules, 250-51; defects in laws, 253-
54

Espionage Act (1917), 194

Ethical Culture movement, 219
Ethical Culture School (N.Y.), 196
Everybody's Magazine, 137
Eviction, The, 179
Evolutionary Thought in America

(Persons), 271
Ex-Convict, The (Porter), 178

"Experiment in Misery, An" (Crane),

55, 58, 104
"Extermination" (StefTens), 105-6
Eytinge, Sol: "The Hearthstone of

the Poor," 117; "A Tragic Story,"

117

Fair Labor Standards Act (1938),
264-65

Faulkner, Harold U., 271

Federal Council of Churches of Christ
in America, 225

Federation of Churches and Christian
Workers (N.Y.), 60

Fitch, John A., 270; The Steel Work-
ers, 247-48

Five Points, 5, 38, 58, 67

Five Points House of Industry
(N.Y.), 58

Flower, B. O., 69, 84, 188; Civiliza-
tion's Inferno, 118

Flynt, Josiah, 142, 143, 145, 151; in-
fluence on social research, 143;
Tramping with Tramps, 142-43

Folks, Homer: The Care of Destitute,
Neglected, and Delinquent Chil-
dren, 270; quoted, 228-29

Follett, Wilson, xi

Ford, James L.: criticism of popular
fiction, 100; on Mrs. Wiggs of the
Cabbage Patch, 166; quoted, 100,
166

Ford, Paul Leicester: The Honorable
Peter Stirling, quoted, 86; on city
missionary work, 58

Forum, The, 20, 69, 270

Frank Leslie's Magazine, 68

Frankel, Lee K., quoted, 138, 139

Frankfurter, Felix, 242; "Hours of
Labor and Realism in Constitutional
Law," quoted, 230

Franklin, Benjamin: "On the Price of
Corn, and Management of the
Poor," quoted, 16; Way to Wealth,
37

Friedman, I. K., 166

"Friendly visitors," 36, 52, 54

"From the Depths" (Ker), 193-94

Index

352

Frost, A. B., 114; "Good Intentions,"

114
Fuller, Henry B., 109
"Furnished Room, The" (Henry),

169

"Gallegher" (Davis), 101-2
Gardener, Helen: "Thrown in with

the City's Dead," 69
Garland, Hamlin, 22; approach to
poverty, 103-4; on urban local color
movement, 98, 99; quoted, 107
George, Henry, 23-25; advocates free
competition, 24-25; influence on
attitudes toward wealth and pov-
erty, 23-24; stimulates interest in
social research, 25; quoted, 128
Georgia, 216, 217
Gibbons, James, Cardinal, 13, 28
Gibson, Charles Dana, 117; "Evening
with the Gentlemen's Sons' Chow-
der Club," 116; "Salons of New
York," 116
Gilded Age, 132

Gilder, Richard Watson, 149, 206
Gist of Art (Sloan), quoted, 185
Glackens, William, 113, 120, 187
Gladden, Washington: deplores lack
of information on poverty, 70; on
social gospel, 28; quoted, 27, 133
Glance at New York, A (Baker), 90
"Gloucester Moors" (Moody), quot-
ed, 175
Golden House, The (Warner), 104-5
Goldmark, Josephine, 233, 270; and
"Brandeis brief" for Muller v. Ore-
gon, 233-34; gathers data for brief
in Stettler v. O'Hara, 240-41; quot-
ed, 159
Gompers, Samuel, 244, 245, 246, 248;

on child labor laws, 218
Good of the Wicked, The (Kildare),

167
Gotham Court (N.Y.), 82, 115
Gould, E. R. L., 82, 83, 149, 207; The
Housing of the Working People,
quoted, 82
Graffenried, Clare de, on effects of
child labor, 78-79

Graham, Charles: "On the Roof of a
Tenement House," 115; "Sketches
in the Fourth Ward," 115

Grayson, William J.: The Hireling
and the Slave, 92

Greeley, Horace, 6; on slums and
public health, 7; on unemployment,
14; and George Lippard, 89

Greenwich Village, 61

Griscom, John H., 4, 5, 34, 83;
quoted, 4

Gunton's Magazine, 126

Haag, Charles, 192-93; "Organized
Labor," 192; "The Strike," 192

Hamilton, Alice, 157, 256

"Hand of Fate, The" (Ker), 194. See
also "From the Depths," (Ker)

Harbor, The (Poole), 182-84

Hard, William, quoted, 252

Harding administration, 260

Harper's Weekly, 114, 128, 270; ar-
ticles on tenement-house problem,
68

Harrigan, Edward, 96-98, 116; ap-
proach to poverty, 96-98; quoted,
31, 97-98

Harrison, Benjamin, 74, 194

Hartford, Conn., 60

Hartford Theological Seminary, 60

Hartley, Robert M., 5, 6, 35-38, 51,
80, 83, 129, 263, 269; advice to the
poor, 38; and New York A.I.C.P.,
35-36; still milk investigation, 35-
36; quoted, 5, 31

Hartley House (N.Y.), 130

Hartmann, Sadakichi, quoted, 186

"Having Their Fling" (Young), 195

Hay market case, 194

Hazard of New Fortunes, A (How-
ells), quoted, 103

Health insurance, 245; movement for,
258-59; opposition to, 259

Hearst, William Randolph, 117

Hearst newspapers, 107, 194, 195

Henderson, Charles R., 157, 206, 207;
quoted, 29, 205

Index

353

Henri group, 187; contribution of,
191; "unconsciously social con-
scious," 190

Henri, Robert, 113, 120, 187, 188, 194,
198; The Art Spirit, 185; quoted,
185, 188

Henry, O., 168-70, 174, 236; approach
to poverty, 168-70; "The Cop and
the Anthem," 168-69; "The Fur-
nished Room," 169; "An Unfinished
Story," 169

Henry Street Settlement (N.Y.), 63.
See also Nurses' Settlement (N.Y.)

Herrick, Robert: A Life for a Life,
quoted, 164, 176

Herron, George D., 25; quoted, 26

Higgins, Eugene, approach to pov-
erty, 191-92

Hill, Octavia, 207, 208

Hine, Lewis W., 196-97

Hireling and the Slave, The (Gray-
son), 92

History of American Life series, 271

History of Labor in the United States
(Commons et al.), Ill

Hocking Valley, Ohio, 74

Hoffman, Frederick L., 256

"Hogan's Alley," 117-18

Hollander, Jacob: definition of the
poor, 125; quoted, 125, 129, 136

"Holy Trinity" (Young), 195

Holy Trinity Church (N.Y.), 57;
tenement houses, 116, 208

Homer, Winslow, 109, 110-11, 112,
113

Homestead, Pa., 248

Homestead strike, 12

Honorable Peter Stirling, The (Ford),
58; quoted, 86

Hookworm infection, 259

Hoosier Schoolmaster, The (Eggle-
ston), 23, 50, 271; quoted, 24

Hoover administration, 261

Hoover, Herbert, 261, 262; on aboli-
tion of poverty, 260

"Hours of Labor and Realism in Con-
stitutional Law" (Frankfurter),
quoted, 230

House of Bondage, The (Kauffman),
176, 239

Housing. See Tenement houses; Ten-
ement-house reform

Housing of the Poor, The (Reyn-
olds), 82-83

Housing Reform (Veiller), 156

Housing of the Working People, The
(Gould), 82, 83, 207

How the Other Half Lives (Riis), 4,
69

Howe, Frederic G: attitude toward
settlement movement, 65; criticism
of Cleveland C.O.S., 54

Howells, William Dean, 25, 55; ap-
proach to poverty, 102-3; criticizes
organized charity, 53; on Dickens,
88; "An East-Side Ramble," 55, 210;
A Hazard of New Fortunes, 103,
128; on insecurity, 128; My Literary
Passions, 88; on slums, 104; "So-
ciety," 103; quoted, 21, 103, 211

Hull House, 61, 63, 79, 158, 209, 232

Hull-House Maps and Papers, 79

Huneker, James, 187

Hunter, Robert, 130, 151, 152, 154,
202, 207, 218, 269, 270; definition
of poverty, 125, 152-53; Poverty,
151-52,270; quoted, 125, 131, 138,215

If Christ Came to Chicago (Stead), 93

Illinois: child-labor law, 218; Supreme
Court, 231, 232; women's hour law
of 1893, 231, 232

Immigration, 7-10, 245-46; and pau-
perism, 8-10; and political corrup-
tion, 10; and poverty problem, 10;
and slums, 7

In Darkest England (Booth), 29, 69

Indenture, 47

Indiana, 50, 205, 223

Indiana University, 151

Industrial accidents, viii, 11, 75, 250,
256, 257, 258; and child labor, 78;
investigations of, 253-54; statistics
on, 252, 255

Industrial Relations, 160-61

Infant mortality, 259; in New York
City, 35, 82; investigations of, 158-
59

In His Steps (Sheldon), 59

Index

354

Insecurity, 15, 261; and poverty, 125,

128
Institutional church movement, 59-60
Intemperance and poverty, 20, 80-82
International aid, ix, 268
Interstate Commerce Commission, 74
Iowa, 74

Iron Heel, The (London), 182
Irvine, Alexander, 58-59
Ithaca, N.Y., 156

James, Henry, on Winslow Homer,

111
Jennie Gerhardt (Dreiser), 170, 172
Jewett, Sarah Orne: "The Town

Poor," 47
Johns Hopkins University, 56, 125
Johnson, Charles H.: "What is Going

on When the Clock Strikes

Twelve," 116
Journals (Emerson), quoted, 16
Judson, Edward Zane Carroll, 90. See

also Ned Buntline
Jukes, The (Dugdale), 70
Jungle, The (Sinclair), quoted, 177

Kauffman, Reginald Wright: The
House of Bondage, 176, 239; quoted,
176

Keller, Helen: Out of the Dark,
quoted, 164

Kelley, Florence, 84, 154, 219, 224,
233, 269, 270; on child labor, 79-80,
220; and Children's Bureau, 221;
minimum wage legislation for wom-
en, 239; and National Consumers'
League, 232ff.; Some Ethical Gains
Through Legislation, 137; views on
labor legislation, 232

Kellogg, Paul U., 154, 248, 259; directs
Pittsburgh survey, 154; The Pitts-
burgh Survey, 270; and Progressive
party platform, 1912, 250

Kellor, Frances, 157; Out of Work,
161; on unemployment, 161

Kelly, Myra, 166; "The Uses of Ad-
versity," 168

Kemble, E. W., 114; illustrations for
A Daughter of the Tenements, 117

Kenyon, Charles: Kindling, 178, 180,

207
Ker, William Balfour: drawings for

Life, 193; "From the Depths," 193-

94; "King Canute," 194
Kildare, Owen, 128, 143, 144, 151; on

bums, 144-45; My Mamie Rose, 143-

44; The Good of the Wicked, 167;

My Old Bailiwick, 144-45; The

Wisdom of the Simple, 127, 145
Kindling (Kenyon), 178, 180, 207
Kipling, Rudyard, quoted, 10
Kirkland, Joseph: Zury, quoted, 20
Kleptomaniac, The (Porter), 178-79
Knights of Labor, 218
Koren, John, 56
Krausz, 119

Labor, 11; American attitudes toward,
17-18; in art, 190-93; in illustrations
and cartoons, 118-19; literary treat-
ment of, 176-77; and poverty prob-
lem, 139. See also Organized labor

Labor disputes, 239-40; injunctions in,
245. See also Strikes

Laffan, W. Mackay, quoted, 112

Laissez faire, 22, 24, 28, 123, 211, 238,
244

"Land of Disasters, The" (Sedgwick),
quoted, 252

Lanier, Sidney: "The Symphony,"
quoted, 95

Larkin, Oliver W.: Art and Life in
America, 271

Larned, Charles W., quoted, 113

Lathrop, Julia, 158

Lawrence strike (1912), 182, 240

"Leaden-Eyed, The" (Lindsay), 95,
179; quoted, 180

Letchworth, William P., on condition
of boys in New York poorhouses, 49

Lewis, Alfred Henry, quoted, 133

Lexow Committee, 141

Library of Congress, xi

Life, 117, 193, 194, 271

Life for a Life, A (Herrick), quoted,
164, 176

Life in America (Davidson), 271

Life in London, 90

Index

355

Life in New York, 90

Life in Philadelphia, 90

Life With Father (Day), 52

Life's Struggles in a Great City, 90

Lincoln, Abraham, 17, 126

Lindsay, Vachel: "The Leaden-Eyed,"
95, 179; quoted, 168, 175, 180

Link, Arthur: American Epoch, 271;
Woodrow Wilson and the Progres-
sive Era, 271

Lippard, George: approach to pov-
erty, 89; New York: Its Upper Ten
and Lower Million, 89; The Quaker
City, 89-90

Lippmann, Walter, 241; quoted, 128-
29, 242

Literary History of the United States
(Spiller et al), 271

Literature of protest, 174rT.; and re-
form, 180

"Little Gray Girl" (Luks), 190

Little Sisters of the Poor, 34

Liverpool, England, 92

Living Wage, A (Ryan), 153-54

Lloyd, Henry Demarest, 25; quoted,
21

London Congregational Union: The
Bitter Cry of Outcast London,
quoted, 46, 60

London, England, 51, 70, 207

London, Jack, 146, 181, 182; criticizes
settlement workers, 65; The Iron
Heel, 182; Martin Eden, 177, 180-
81; The People of the Abyss, 93;
quoted, 181

Long Day, The (Richardson), 147-48

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth:
"The Challenge," quoted, 86

Looking Backward (Bellamy), 25,
102-3

"Love in the Big Barracks" (Ralph),
101

"Love Letters of Smith, The" (Bun-
ner), 99, 101

Lowell, James Russell: "A Parable,"
92-93, 103; quoted, 92-93

Lowell, Josephine Shaw, 46, 139, 202,
232, 263, 269, 270; on impersonal
causes of poverty, 21-22; on indus-
trial unrest, 12; on institutional care

of the poor, 47-48; and New York
C.O.S., 52; opposes public outdoor
relief, 47-48; Public Relief and Priv-
ate Charity, 269-70; quoted, 44-45
Lowell, Mass., factory girls, 87
Low life: in art, 111, 116-17, 118, 189;
literary treatment of, 88, 96, 100,
102
Ludlow (Colo.) massacre (1914), 182
Luks, George B., 117-18, 187, 189;
"Hogan's Alley," 117-18; "Little
Gray Girl," 190; views on poverty,
189

Maggie, A Girl of the Streets (Crane),
105-6

"Maggie Murphy's Home" (Harri-
gan), quoted, 98

Mahan, Alfred Thayer, 59

Main-Travelled Roads (Garland), 22;
quoted, 103-4

Making of an American, The (Riis),
204

Manly, Basil M., 129, 134; on findings
of Commission on Industrial Rela-
tions, 159-60

Mann Act (1910), 239

Man's World, A (Bullard), quoted,
181-82

"Man with the Hoe, The" (Mark-
ham), 95, 175; influence on reform-
ers, 107; quoted, 106-7

Markham, Edwin, 95; on Eugene Hig-
gins, 191; "The Man with the Hoe,"
106-7; quoted, 106-7, 213

Martin Eden (London), 177, 180-81

Massachusetts, 33, 211, 225; employers'
liability law, 75; minimum-wage
law, 240, 242

Massachusetts Bureau of Labor Statis-
tics, 73, 75, 76

Masses, The, 194, 195, 270

Matthews, Brander, 64, 98; "Before
the Break of Day," quoted, 99; "In
Search of Local Color," quoted, 99-
100

Maurer, Louis: "Forty-third Street
West of Ninth Avenue," 112

Index

McAllister, Ward: Society as I Found
It, 69

McColgan, Daniel T., 270

McCutcheon, John T., 115

McDougall, Walt: "Royal Feast of
Belshazzar Blaine and the Money-
Kings," 119

McKelway, A. J., 224

"McNally's Row of Flats" (Harri-
gan), quoted, 97-98

McTeague. A Story of San Francisco
(Norris), 106, 110, 165-67, 174

Medical knowledge, influence on atti-
tude toward poverty, 129-30

Meeker, Royal, 256

Melville, Herman: on poverty, 19-20;
Redburn, quoted, 92

"Men and Religion Forward" move-
ment, 157

Mencken, H. L., 171

Metropolitan Magazine, 271; quoted,
123

Michigan, 241; labor bureau, 73

Millet, Jean Francois, 106, 191^

Minimum-wage legislation, 238fT.; and
Adkins v. Children's Hospital, 242-
43; attitude of organized labor
toward, 239, 241; District of Colum-
bia, 240, 242; Fair Labor Standards
Act, 264-65; Massachusetts, 240, 242;
Nebraska, 240; Oregon, 240; and
Stettler v. O'Hara, 241

Miser's Hoard, The, 179

Missionaries, city, 34

Missouri, 241

Mistake, The (Hartley), 38

Mitchell, John Ames, 117, 193, 194;
The Silent War, 182, 193

Model-tenement movement, 206-7, 208

Moody, William Vaughn: "The
Brute," 176; "Gloucester Moors,"
quoted, 175-76

Morris, Charles, 77

Morse, Samuel F. B., opposes immi-
gration, 8

Mothers' pension movement, 222-23

Motion pictures, approach to poverty
in, 178-79

356

Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch
(Rice), 166, 271; hostile view of
charity organization, 53
Muckrakers, 84, 132; muckraking

movement, 140
Muhlenberg, William A., 59
Mulberry Bend (N.Y.), 99, 105, 112
"Mulberry Springs" (Harrigan),

quoted, 97
Muller v. Oregon, 233-34, 237, 241,

242
Mulligan plays (Harrigan), 98
Murphy, Edgar Gardner, 219; advo-
cates state child-labor laws, 217;
"Child Labor as a National Prob-
lem," 218-19; opposes federal regu-
lation of child labor, 224; quoted,
217
"My Disreputable Friend, Mr. Rae-

gan" (Davis), 102
Myers, Gustavus, 132
Myers, Jerome, 187, 190, 191-92; on

slums, 192; quoted, 190
My Literary Passions (Howells), 88
My Mamie Rose (Kildare), 144
My Old Bailiwick (Kildare), 144-45
Mysteries and Miseries of New York
(Buntline), 89, 90

Naples, Italy, 70

Nathan, Maud, 205

National Academy of Design, 186,
187, 188, 190

National Association of Manufactur-
ers, 225, 255

National Child Labor Committee, 196,
219, 228, 270; and federal regulation
of child labor, 220, 224fT.; model
child-labor bill, 219; seeks better
state regulation of child labor, 219-
20; seeks establishment of Children's
Bureau, 221

National Conference of Charities and
Correction, 79, 218, 247, 250, 270

National Conference of Social Work,
270

National Consumers' League, 219, 270;
and labor legislation for women,
232ff.; and minimum-wage legisla-

index

tion, 239-40; supports child-labor
legislation, 225

National Freedmen's Relief Associa-
tion, 43

Nearing, Scott, quoted, 135

Need of Gold, The, 179

Neglected Girl, The (True), quoted,
127

Negro Artisan, The (Du Bois and
Dill), quoted, 140

"Negro in the Cities of the North,
The," 154

Negroes, 43, 117, 149

Neighborhood Guild (N.Y.), 61, 63;
clubs, 63. See also University Set-
tlement (N.Y.)

Neill, Charles P., 157-58, 256; quoted,
158, 215

Nevins, Allan, 271

Newberry Library (Chicago), xi, 269

New Deal, 197, 261fT.; attitude toward
poverty, 265-66

New Democracy, The (Weyl),
quoted, 129, 140

New Freedom, The (Wilson), quot-
ed, 244

New Jersey: child-labor law, 218;
Consumers' League, 234

New Masses, 194

Newsboy, The (Smith), 39, 91, 271;
quoted, 77

New York (State), 50, 78, 223, 241;
child-labor law, 218; Court of Ap-
peals, 237-38; labor bureau, 76

New York As It Is, 90

New York Association for Improving
the Condition of the Poor (A.I.
C.P.), 5, 7, 31, 35, 116, 125, 129, 219,
270; "incidental labors," 37; and
model-tenement movement, 207

New York Burglars; or Wedded by
Moonlight, 90

New York Charity Organization So-
ciety, 52, 56, 205; Provident Loan
Society, 52; tenement-house com-
mittee, 149, 208, 209; tenement-
house exhibition, 149-50; and Tene-
ment House Law of 1901, 209;
woodyard, 52

357

New York Child Labor Committee,

218, 219
New York City, 8, 9, 12, 38, 40, 57, 58,
59, 69, 70, 78, 90, 96, 118, 120, 141,
149, 207, 232; Baxter Street, 105;
city missions, 58; East Side, 61, 99,
190; Five Points district, 5, 50, 58,
67; infant mortality rates, 35; mor-
tality rates in tenements, 82; Mul-
berry Bend, 99, 105, 112; tenement-
house investigation of 1900, 149-50;
tenement-house problem, 68
New York Evening Post, 186
New York: Its Upper Ten and Lower

Million (Lippard), 89
New York Mission and Tract Society,

34
New York Public Library, xi, 269
New York School of Philanthropy,

249
New York School of Social Work, xi
New York Society for the Prevention

of Pauperism, 8
New York State Charities Aid Asso-
ciation, 50
New York State Factory Investigating

Commission, 196, 237-38, 241
New York State Tenement House

Commission (1900), 149-50
New York Sunday American, 195
New York Tenement House Commit-
tee (1894), 206
New York tenement-house exhibition

of 1900, 149-50, 155, 205, 211
New York Tenement House Law

(1901), 209
New York Tribune, 14, 68; quoted, 6
New York World, 118
"Next Door to Congress," 154
Norris, Frank, 110; McTeague. A
Story of San Francisco, 106, 165-
67; The Octopus, 174, 175
North American Review, The, 271
North Carolina, 216, 217, 225
Nurses' Settlement (N.Y.), 232

Occupational diseases, 74, 250, 255,

256, 259
Octopus, The (Norris), 174-75

Index

358

O'Hara, Edwin V., 240

Ohio, 241; condition of children in
county poorhouses, 49; labor bu-
reau, 74

Ohio State University, xi

Old-age insurance, 250, 259, 263, 264

Old-age pensions, 263, 264

Oliver Twist (Dickens), 100

On the Price of Corn and the Man-
agement of the Poor (Franklin),
quoted, 16

Oregon: minimum-wage law, 135, 240;
Muller v. Oregon, 233-34; State In-
dustrial Welfare Commission, 240;
Stettler v. O'Hara, 241; Supreme
Court, 240, 241; ten-hour law for
women, 233-34

Oregon Consumers' League, 240

O'Reilly, John Boyle, quoted, 53

Organized labor, 244, 246, 248, 255;
attitude toward minimum-wage leg-
islation, 239, 241; attitude toward
social insurance, 259, 263; supports
child-labor laws, 218; and women's
hour-laws, 231

"Organized Labor" (Haag), 192

Outcault, R. F., 117-18

Outdoor relief. See Poor relief

Outlook, The, 126, 137, 271

Out of the Dark (Keller), quoted, 164

Out of the Streets, 90

Out of Work (Kellor), 161

Ovington, Mary White, 149

Oxford University, 60

Packingtoivn (Simons), 148

Paine, Robert Treat, 82

"Parable, A" (Lowell), 92-93, 103;
quoted, 92-93

Paris, France, 70, 191, 194

Parker, Theodore, 20, 25, 27, 210;
quoted, 258

Parsons, Herbert, 223

Paternalism: as solution of industrial
problems, 11; and functions of gov-
ernment, 267

Paterson (N.J.) strike, 182

Patten, Simon N., 128

Pauperism, 10, 48, 51, 70, 123, 124,
205, 263; distinguished from pov-
erty, 125; more frequently studied
than poverty, 71; no accurate sta-
tistics on, 72

Pease, Lewis M., 58

Pennsylvania, 148, 219, 220, 248

People of the Abyss, The (London),
93

Persons, Stow: Evolutionary Thought
in America, 21 \

Pettengill, Lillian, 146

Phelps, Elizabeth Stuart: The Silent
Partner, 76, 95; "The Tenth of
January," quoted, 94-95

Philadelphia, 59, 90, 120, 207

Philadelphia and Reading Railway,
246

Philanthropy: characteristics of late
nineteenth century, 124; effect of
Civil War on, 44; influences atti-
tudes toward poverty, viii; and
realism, 140; and reform, 32

Philanthropy, scientific, 13, 34, 46rf.;
52, 124, 261; and new view of pov-
erty, 124; and preventive social
work, 138

Photoengraving, 114-15

"Pigs and Children" (Young), 196

Pittsburgh, Pa., 12, 154-55, 235, 247

Pittsburgh survey, 154-57, 193, 234,
235, 247, 248, 253, 259; influence on
reform, 156

Pittsburgh Survey, The (Kellogg),
156, 270

Plague in Its Stronghold, The (Poole),
205

"Plea for the Picturesqueness of New
York" (Hartmann), quoted, 186

Poole, Ernest: on child labor in street
trades, 215; The Harbor, 182-84;
The Plague in Its Stronghold, 205

Poor, the, 32, 36, 37, 54, 62, 96, 123;
American attitudes toward, 22; ar-
tistic interest in, 198; attitude of
nineteenth-century philanthropists
toward, 50-51; C. O.S. attitude
toward, 55; definition of, 125, 152-
53; Hartley's advice to, 37-38; Jacob
Riis on, 69; literary treatment of,

Index

167-68, 177-78; model dwellings for,
206-8; religious concern with, 57;
and settlement houses, 62, 64-66;
treatment of in art, 189-90, 192

"Poor in Great Cities, The" (Woods
et al), 69-70, 271

Poor of New York, The (Boucicault),
90; quoted, 91

Poor relief, 9, 33, 46, 266; aims and
methods in nineteenth century, 47;
in depression of 193 0's, 262-63; fed-
eral participation in, 262-63; Works
Progress Administration, 262-63

Poorhouses. See Almshouses

Porter, Edwards: The Ex-Convict,
178, 180; The Kleptomaniac, 178-79

Porter, William Sydney. See Henry,
O.

Potter, Clara, 78

Poverty, 48, 54, 61, 66, 69, 178, 191,
260; American attitudes toward,
vii-viii, 3, 16, 21, 29-30, 55, 56, 84,
126, 128, 129-30, 134-36, 201-3, 260,
265-66; Charles Booth on causes of,
71; and "child saving" movement,
212-13; definition of, 125; economic
interpretation of, 21-22, 134-35;
Henry George on, 23-24; individu-
alistic interpretation of, 16-19, 22,
84, 134-35; and intemperance, 20,
80-82; and international aid, ix,
268; and labor problem, 139; lack of
reliable information on, 70, 83; lit-
erary approaches to, 86-87, 100, 104,
164-65, 170, 175; major social causes
of, 249, 257; in motion pictures,
178-79; new view of, 124ff., 130-31,
139, 214, 249; and preventive social
work, 138, 246; religious interpreta-
tion of, 16, 18, 28, 130; social prob-
lem of, vii-viii, 3-4, 42-43, 248-49;
treatment of in art, 188-89, 198

Poverty (Hunter), 151-52, 270

Poverty; The Challenge to the Church
(Penman), quoted, 131

"Poverty's Tears Ebb and Flow"
(Harrigan), 31

Preventive social work. See Social
work, preventive

Princeton University, 145, 182

359

Prison Association of New York, 70
Prisoners of Poverty (Campbell), 76
"Private Life of the Gamin," 114
Progress and Poverty (George), 23,

129
Progressive era, xi, 45, 85, 129, 132,

135, 140, 164, 175, 198, 201, 213, 250
Prohibition, 227
Proletarian novels, 182
Prostitution, 239
Protestantism, 57
Public assistance. See Poor relief
Public housing movement, 210-12
Public relief. See Poor relief
Public Relief and Private Charity

(Lowell), 269-70

Quaker City, The (Lippard), 89, 90
Quill, Harry, 68

"Rag Pickers of New York," 114

Rainsford, W. S., 59; advocates evan-
gelical work among the poor, 57; on
unionism, 12

Ralph, Julian, 82; approach to pov-
erty, 101; quoted, 101

Rauschenbusch, Walter, 132-33; Chris-
tianity and the Social Crisis, 260; on
effects of poverty, 126-27; quoted,
134, 260

Realism: in social science, 84; as char-
acteristic of Progressive era, 140;
revival of, in art, 187-191, 198

Report on Condition of Woman and
Child Wage Earners in the United
States (U. S. Bureau of Labor), 224,
236-37, 270

Rerum novarum, 28

Revenue Act of 1919, 225

Revolution and Tradition in Modern
American Art (Baur), 271

Reynolds, James B., 158, 246

Reynolds, Marcus T.: The Housing
of the Poor, 82-83

Rice, Alice Hegan, 166, 167, 174; Mrs.
Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch, 166,
271

Richardson, Dorothy, 151; The Long
Day, 147-48

Index

Richmond, Mary E., 133-34; Social
Diagnosis, 156

"Right to Grief, The" (Sandburg),
177

Riis, Jacob, 4, 65, 70, 83, 84, 105, 116,
149, 154, 205, 269; How the Other
Half Lives, 4, 69; on intemperance
among the poor, 82; The Making of
an American, quoted, 204; on tene-
ment-house problem, 68-69

River Tragedy, The, 179

Roberts, Peter, 148

Robins, Raymond, 247

Rockefeller, John D., 133, 166

Rogers, W. A., 114, 115-16; "Lunch-
Time on the Wharf," 114

Roman Catholic Church. See Catholic
Church

Roosevelt, Franklin D., 261, 262, 263,
264, 265, 266; quoted, 262-63, 263,
265

Roosevelt, Theodore, 149, 205, 221

Rosenfeld, Morris, quoted, 176, 177

Rowntree, B. Seebohm, 128

Rubinow, I. M., 257, 259; Social Insur-
ance, 249; quoted, 252

Russell, Charles Edward, 197; on
slums, 205; quoted, 137

Russell Sage Foundation, 127, 197,
249, 270; Boyhood and Lawlessness,
127, 197; Committee on Women's
Work, 235, 236; community sur-
veys, 156-57; Division of Industrial
Studies, 236; and Pittsburgh survey,
155; subsidizes social research, 156

Ryan, John A., 269; A Living Wage,
153-54; and minimum- wage legisla-
tion, 238, 239

Sacco-Vanzetti case, 194

Salvation Army, 57; influence of, 28-

29
Samaritan Hospital (Philadelphia), 59
Sandburg, Carl: "The Right to Grief ,"

177; quoted, 175, 237
San Francisco Examiner, 107
Sanitary Condition of the Laboring

Population of New York, The

(Griscom), 34

360

Saturday Evening Post, The, 194

"Scene in Shantytown," 115

Schlesinger, Arthur M., 271

Schuyler, Louisa Lee, 50
, Scientific philanthropy. See Philan-
thropy, scientific

Scranton, Pa., 156

Scribner's Magazine, 22, 69, 100, 186,
204, 271

Seager, Henry R., 135, 249

"Search of Local Color, In" (Mat-
thews), 64

Sedgwick, Ellery: "The Land of Dis-
asters," quoted, 252

Settlement house movement, 60-66;
contribution to social work and so-
cial reform, 66; and social investiga-
tions, 64, 149

Settlement houses, 60-66, 149, 204, 205

Settlement workers, 124, 202-3, 246;
and social reform, 66

Sheldon, Charles M., 59

Shinn, Everett, 120, 190-91

Sickness and attitudes toward pov-
erty, 130; as cause of poverty, 258;
as social problem, 258

Sickness insurance, 257. See also
Health insurance

Silent Partner, The (Phelps), 76, 95

Silent War, The (Mitchell), 182, 193

Simkhovitch, Mary Kingsbury, on set-
tlement work, 64, 66

Simons, A. M.: Packingtown, 148

Sinclair, Upton, 176, 180, 182; The
Cry for Justice, 271; The Jungle,
quoted, 177

Single Tax, 25

Sister Carrie (Dreiser), 170, 171-72,
173

Sisters of Charity of Saint Vincent de
Paul, 34

Sloan, John, 113, 120, 187, 190; Gist
of Art, quoted, 185, 189

Slums, 38, 62; city missions and mis-
sionaries in, 57-59; investigated by
Commissioner of Labor, 72; literary
treatment of, 92, 96, 100, 104-6; and
poverty problem, 4; public attitude
toward, 67-68, 205; treatment of in
art, 189, 191-92

Index

Smith, Adam: The Wealth of Na-
tions, quoted, 244

Smith, Alfred E., 237

Smith, Elizabeth Oakes, 39; approach
to poverty, 91-92; The Newsboy,
39, 91, 271; quoted, 77

Smith, F. Hopkinson: "Under the
Towers," 112

Smith, Matthew Hale, quoted, 65-66

Smith, Seba, 91

Social criticism: in art, 190-98; in lit-
erature, 88-93, 102-7, 174-84

Social Darwinism, 19

Social Diagnosis (Richmond), 156

Social gospel movement, 27-28, 132

Social insurance, 249, 250, 257, 259;
attitude toward in 1930's, 263

Social Insurance (Rubinow), 249

Social reform, 64, 66, 130, 136, 260,
261, 264

Social research, 55-56, 164; and re-
form, 161-63

Social Salvation (Gladden), 27

Social Security Act (1935), 263-64

Social work, viii, 34, 46ff., 54, 66, 193,
202, 259, 261

Social work, preventive, 249, 266-67;
and New Deal, 261; and Progressive
reforms, 138; and scientific philan-
thropy, 138

Social workers, 52-56, 75, 124, 125, 126,
129, 130, 139, 159, 193, 202-3, 246,
257, 258; attitude toward mothers'
pensions, 222-23; influence on re-
form, 201-3; in New Deal, 261-62;
and Progressive Party platform of
1912, 250

Socialism, 193, 203, 211

Socialism and American Life (Egbert
and Persons), 271

Socialist party, 182, 190

"Society" (Howells), quoted, 103

Society as I Found It (McAllister), 69

Society of Saint Vincent de Paul, 34-
35

Some Ethical Gains Through Legis-
lation (Kelley), 137

Song of Myself (Whitman), 92

Song of the Sower, The (Bryant), 95

South Carolina, 216, 217

361

Spahr, Charles B., 72, 83; America's
Working People, 148

Spanish- American War, 194

Spargo, John, 224; The Bitter Cry of
the Children, 137, 214; on child la-
bor, 214, 216; on Charles Haag, 193;
on Eugene Higgins, 191; on George
Luks, 190

Spencer, Herbert, 19

Springfield, III, 157

Springfield, Mass., 42

St. George's Church (N.Y.), 59

St. Judes, Whitechapel (London), 60

St. Louis, Mo., 191

St. Luke's Hospital (N.Y.), 59

St. Nicholas Magazine, 191

St. Paul, Minn., 156

State boards of charities, 48; reports
on conditions in almshouses, 49-50

State bureaus of labor statistics, 71,
72,73

Stead, William T., 29, 141; criticism
of charity organization movement,
53; // Christ Came to Chicago, 93

Steel Workers, The (Fitch), 247-48

Steffens, Lincoln, 117; "Extermina-
tion," 105-6

Sternberg, George M., 207

Stealer v. O'Hara, 241

Stevens, Alzina P., 79

Steward, Ira, quoted, 20

Stewart, William Rhinelander, 270

Stieglitz, Alfred, 120, 197

Stokes, J. G. Phelps, xi, 269; quoted,
130

Story of To-Day, A (Davis), 94

Stover, Charles B., 61

"Strike, The" (Haag), 192

Strikes, 12; Lawrence, 182, 240; and
proletarian novels, 182-84

Strong, Josiah, 13, 21; definition of
institutional church, 59; on Salva-
tion Army, 29; on slums, 6; quoted,
26

"Struggle Against Social Despotism,
The," 137

Substitutes for the Saloon (Calkins),
81

Sumner, William Graham, 152

Index

Supervision and Education in Chari-
ties (Brackets), 270

Survey, The, 157, 259, 270

Sutherland, George, decision in Ad-
kins v. Children's Hospital, 2M-AI

"Symphony, The" (Lanier), quoted,
95

Taft, William H., 159

Tariff issue, effect on attitudes toward
poverty, 23

Tawney, R. H., quoted, 136, 139, 162

Taylor, Graham, 60, 62

Temperance movement, and poverty
problem, 80-81

Temple University, 59

Tenement-house laws and ordinances,
82, 208-9; Chicago, 209-10; enforce-
ment, 210; New York (1901), 209-
10

Tenement House "Problem, The (De
Forest and Veiller), 211, 270; as
model of social research, 150-51

Tenement-house reform, 204ff., 219;
relation to other reforms, 228-29

Tenement houses, 7, 36-37, 83; de-
picted by illustrators, 115-16; Goth-
am Court, 115; Harper's Weekly
exposes conditions in, 68; improved
management movement, 207-8; and
intemperance, 81-82; "landlord mis-
sionaries," 207, 208; model, 58, 206-
7, 208; New York Tenement House
Committee (1894), 206; New York
tenement-house exhibition of 1900,
149-50, 205; Trinity Church, 116,
208. See also Public housing move-
ment

"Tenth of January, The" (Phelps),
quoted, 94-95

"Third Violet, The" (Crane), quoted,
108

Thomas, Norman, 194

"Thrown in with the City's Dead"
(Gardener), 69

Thulstrup, Thure de: "Where Two
Ends Meet," 118, 119

Tiffany, Louis C: "Old New York,"
112

362

Topeka, Kans., 59, 156
"Town Poor, The" (Jewett), 47
Townsend, E. W., 112; A Daughter
of the Tenements, 117; quoted, 105
Toynbee, Arnold, 60
Toynbee Hall (London), 60, 61
"Trailer for Room No. 8, The"

(Davis), 102
Tramp problem, 14, 142-43
Tramping with Tramps (Flynt), 142
Traveller from Altruria, A (How-
ells), quoted, 103
Trends in Social Work (Bruno), 270
Triangle Waist Company (N.Y.), 237
Trinity Corporation (N.Y.), tene-
ment properties, 208. See also Holy
Trinity Church
True, Ruth S., quoted, 137-38
Truth, 100, 118
Tuberculosis, 259
Tuckerman, Joseph, 33-34, 80, 263,

269,270
Turner, George Kibbe: "The Daugh-
ters of the Poor," 239

Ulrich, Charles F.: "The Land of

Promise," 113
Uncle Remus (Harris), 114
Under the Gas Light (Daly), 90
"Under the Lion's Paw" (Garland),

22
Unemployment: attitudes toward, 14-
15; causes studied, 74; conflicting
estimates of extent, 73; and poverty
problem, 134-35; no reliable data on
extent, 160-61
Unemployment insurance, 245, 250,

259, 263, 264
"Unfinished Story, An" (Henry), 169
"Unguarded Gates" (Aldrich), 10
United Charities Building (N.Y.), 219
United Hebrew Charities of New

York City, 138
United States Bureau of Labor, 158,
249; Report on Condition of Wom-
an and Child Wage Earners in the
United States, 236-37, 270
United States Bureau of Labor Statis-
tics, 211

Index

363

United States Census Bureau, 71

United States Children's Bureau: in-
vestigation of infant and maternal
mortality, 158-59; significance of
establishment, 221-22

United States Christian Commission,
43

United States Commission on Indus-
trial Relations, 129, 134, 159-61

United States Commissioner of Labor,
72, 76, 205; report on slums, 6

United States Congress, 72-73, 154,
159, 221, 262, 263, 264, 265

United States Department of Agricul-
ture, 72, 196

United States Department of Com-
merce and Labor, 221

United States Department of Justice,
195

United States Sanitary Commission,
43, 44, 50

United States Steel Corporation, 247,
248

United States Supreme Court, 225,
226, 264; Adkins v. Children's Hos-
pital, 242-43; Muller v. Oregon, 233-
34; Stealer v. O'Hara, 240-41

University Settlement (N.Y.), 61, 62,
63, 183, 205, 247

Upper Ten and the Lower Twenty,
The, 90

Van Kleeck, Mary, 235-36; quoted,
238

Van Vorst, Bessie and Marie, 146, 147,
148, 151, 224

Van Vorst, Marie, quoted, 146-47

Varg, Helen, xii

Varg, Paul A., xi

Veiller, Lawrence: drafts model ten-
ement-house law, 209; Housing Re-
form, 156; New York tenement-
house exhibition of 1900, 149-50;
opposes municipal housing, 211;
The Tenement House Problem,
150-51

Victorian era, 123

"Voluntarism," 245-46, 248

Waddy Googan (Harrigan), 98

Wages, 33, 74, 239; and poverty prob-
lem, 134-35; women's, 75-76, 234ff.
See also Minimum-wage legislation

Wagner, Robert F., 237

Wald, Lillian, 157, 219, 232; proposes
establishment of Children's Bureau,
221

Ward, Lester Frank: Applied Soci-
ology, 126

Warner, Amos G., 56, 80, 269, 270;
American Charities, 270; on causes
of poverty, 84; poverty and degen-
eration, 70-71; quoted, 67

Warner, Charles Dudley: The Golden
House, 104-5; on unionism, 12

Washington, D.C., 41, 154, 196, 207,
214

Waterston, R. C: on women's wages,
75

Watson, Frank Dekker: The Charity
Organization Movement in the
United States, 270

"Way to Make the Poor Rich" (Hart-
ley), 35

Way to Wealth, The (Franklin), 37

Wealth: American attitudes toward,
21, 131-34; gospel of, 31-32; and
attitudes toward poverty, 3, 128-29

Wealth of Nations, The (Smith),
quoted, 244

Weir, John F.: "The Gun Foundry,"
113; "Forging the Shaft," 113

Welfare work. See Social work

Weller, Charles, 196

Weyl, Walter: The New Democracy,
quoted, 140; on social surplus, 129

When Social Work Was Young (De-
vine), 270

White, Alfred T., 207

White, William Allen, 132

White, William J., 247

White House Conference on the
Care of Dependent Children (1909),
247; and children's bureau bill, 221;
and mothers' pension movement,
222

Whitlock, Brand, 178

Whitman, Walt, approach to poverty,
92

Index

364

Widows' pensions, 125, 222. See also
Mothers' pension movement

Willard, Frances, 80, 142

Willoughby, W. F.: on effects of
child labor, 78-79; studies working-
men's insurance, 75

Wilson, Woodrow: The New Free-
dom, quoted, 244

Wilson administration, 159, 160

Wines, Frederick H., 49; quoted, 46

Wisconsin, child-labor law, 218

Wisdom of the Simple, The (Kil-
dare), 145

Woman Who Toils, The (Van
Vorst), 146-47

Women and the Trades (Butler),
234-35

Women's hour legislation, 230ff., 238;
attitude of organized labor toward,
231; Illinois eight-hour law, 231-32;
Mutter v. Oregon, 233-34; Oregon
ten-hour law, 233

Women's Trade Union League, 239

Woodrow Wilson and the Progres-
sive Era (Link), 271

Woods, Robert A., 70, 155; on Sal-
vation Army, 28-29

Woodward, S. W., on child labor, 214

Woolf,M.A., 117

Work (Alcott), 75

Work accidents. See Industrial acci-
dents

Work Accidents and the Law (East-
man), 253-54
Workers, The (Wyckoff ), 146
Workingmen's insurance, 249. See also

Social insurance
Workmen's compensation laws: de-
fects of, 255-56-, results of, 255-57;
principle of, 254-55; movement for,
250-55
Works Progress Administration, 262-

63
World War I, 132, 201, 212, 261
Wreckers: A Social Study, The

(Dowling), 22, 271; quoted, 96
Wright, Carroll D., 73, 75-76, 157-58
Wyckoff, Walter, 145, 146, 148, 151;
influence on social research, 146;
The Workers, 146

Young, Art, 193, 194-96; "American
Mothers," 196; "Having Their
Fling," 195; "Holy Trinity," 195;
"Pigs and Children," 196; quoted,
195

Young Men's Christian Association,
41-42, 43, 59, 60, 67

Young Women's Christian Associa-
tion, 60, 241

Zury (Kirkland), 20

University of
Connecticut

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